Antiwar | One of the things itching the people who demand more transparency and accountability in Obama’s drone war is that the secrecy of the program means that the government doesn’t publicly release casualty estimates. This has led a number of journalistic and think-tank organizations to do their due diligence and come up with their own estimates with their own methodologies. Even United Nations special rapporteur Ben Emmerson is in the beginning stages of an investigation into drone deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

Wired | “Imminence” used to mean something in military terms: namely, that an adversary had begun preparations for an assault. In order to justify his drone strikes on American citizens, President Obama redefined that concept to exclude any actual adversary attack.That’s the heart of the Justice Department’s newly leaked white paper, first reported by NBC News, explaining why a “broader concept of imminence” (.pdf) trumps traditional Constitutional protections American citizens enjoy from being killed by their government without due process. It’s an especially striking claim when considering that the actual number of American citizens who are “senior operational leader[s] of al-Qaida or its associated forces” is vanishingly small. As much as Obama talks about rejecting the concept of “perpetual war” he’s providing, and institutionalizing, a blueprint for it.

Daily Mail | A Bulgarian politician today survived an extraordinary assassination attempt when a man stormed the stage and held a gun to his head as he was giving a speech. Fortunately for Ahmed Dogan, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the weapon misfired giving him time to react and hit the would-be assassin's hand out of the way.

Press TV | PDF The internal papers were obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice fund via a Freedom of Information Act Request. Jason Leopold, an investigative journalist for Truth-Out, has obtained FBI documents - through the Freedom of Information Act - relating to Occupy Wall Street. Most of the pages in the documents are redacted, and show concerns of cyber threats against the financial sector. However, there are questions of assassination plots against Occupy activists in Houston, Texas. Because the documents have redactions, it is not clear who or what group was planning the assassinations.

Daily Mail | A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico. Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container. But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.

Business Insider | NYU student Josh Begley is tweeting every reported U.S. drone strike since 2002, and the feed highlights a disturbing tactic employed by the U.S. that is widely considered a war crime. Known as the "double tap," the tactic involves bombing a target multiple times in relatively quick succession, meaning that the second strike often hits first responders.

Politico | Washington has many “secrets,” but few secrets. The Obama administration will face a test on the difference this month, in a case probing a major national security program. The administration is defending a federal court challenge to one of its most significant operations in the war against Al Qaeda: the drone program of targeted killings. President Barack Obama’s lawyers insist the entire program is a “secret” — so it can’t even be hauled into court in the first place.

FAIR | NYT piece raises questions, but not a media conversation. The New York Times' lengthy report (5/29/12) on Barack Obama's drone "kill list" should provoke serious questions: Is such a program legal? How does it square with Obama's criticism of the Bush administration's "war on terror" policies? Is the White House covering up the killing of civilians by labeling them "militants"? Why is the United States continuing an assassination policy described as Al-Qaeda's top "recruiting tool"?

Anti-War | Following in a long line of things that President Obama is supposedly fundamentally morally opposed to that he does anyways, the New York Times has a lengthy new expose on the policy of targeted assassinations, with the revelation that the president has put himself at the center of the campaign.

The Atlantic | White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan, who is taking on new authority over strikes, once backed "enhanced-interrogation techniques." As I figure it, there are two death panels in the United States. One is within the C.I.A., where high-ranking intelligence professionals decide, via some opaque protocol, who they want to kill with armed drones. I used to assume that they put all the names on a list. But it was subsequently reported that sometimes the C.I.A. kills people whose identities it doesn't even know.

NPR | U.S. intelligence officials announced last week that they had broken up a plan by al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen to blow up a plane headed toward the United States. U.S. officials are aggressively targeting terrorists in Yemen, which is now considered to be "the greatest external threat facing the U.S. homeland in terms of terrorism," says investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.

Rawstory | MIT professor Noam Chomsky on Monday decried the use of drones against suspected terrorists, saying that it was murder and violated due process. “If Bush, the Bush Administration, didn’t like somebody, they’d kidnap them and send them to torture chambers,” he said on Democracy Now. “If the Obama Administration decides they don’t like somebody, they murder them, so you don’t have to have torture chambers all over.”

PRESS TV | Washington has fabricated the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan to relieve political pressure on US President Barack Obama, Press TV reports. James Fetzer, American Philosopher and former Marine Corps officer, says Washington fabricated the bin Laden raid to divert public attention from “Obama not having closed Guantanamo, having stationed troops in Pakistan and having his birth certificate being subjected to minute scrutiny.”

ACLU.org | Today, the New York Times ran an ACLU op-ed about the CIA's misuse of secrecy to withhold information from the public about the agency's targeted killing program, which has so far killed thousands of people, including several Americans. The piece, penned by ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and National Security Project Legal Fellow Nathan Wessler, explains that in ACLU lawsuits about the drone strike program the CIA has consistently taken the position that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the program or any records related to it, despite the fact that numerous other government officials have spoken about the program to the public and the press. The op-ed states,