A U.S. drone strike killed three people in northwest Pakistan earlier today, marking the first such attack since Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif publicly called for President Obama to end the strikes. Just last week, Amnesty International said the United States may be committing war crimes by killing innocent Pakistani civilians in drone strikes. Today we air extended clips from the new documentary, "Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars," and speak to filmmaker Robert Greenwald. The film looks at the impact of U.S. drone strikes through more than 70 interviews with attack survivors in Pakistan, a former U.S. drone operator, military officials and more. The film opens with the story of a 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, who was killed by a drone just days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. We are also joined by human rights attorney Jennifer Gibson of Reprieve, co-author of the report, "Living Under Drones." ( + Transcript)

NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, is ready to go to Germany and testify over the US wiretapping of Angela Merkel’s phone on condition of granting him political asylum, a German MP who met Snowden has said. He also revealed the text of Snowden’s letter. Former contractor of the US National Security Agency, Snowden on Friday indicated he is ready to testify over the facts about the American snooping revealed in leaked documents, but only after his “humanitarian situation” is resolved, according to a letter handed over by Snowden to German Greens lawmaker, Hans-Christian Stroebele. “Though the outcome of my efforts has been demonstrably positive, my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. However, speaking the truth is not a crime,” Snowden said in his letter to German officials.

Der Spiegel: Treffen mit Grünen-Politiker Ströbele: Snowden ist zur Aussage in Deutschland bereit

A former White House advisor who is also a victim of US spying activities has spoken out against Washington’s surveillance programs. In an interview with Press TV, Gwenyth Todd said the recent revelations about US spying practices show “nobody has any privacy anymore.”

“I don’t think that it’s a secret between countries whether they are allies or partners or friends or even enemies that everyone seems to be spying on everyone else, everyone who can,” Todd said. “There is always a political dimension. You will be looking for certain things to bolster a particular political policy or argument. I can give you an example of just how much data they mine on people,” she added. “I had a lawyer go and ask for the files on me in New York, the United States. He was told that there were over 50,000 individual files on me alone … in my case, it was the Bahraini and the US government acting together against me in fact with regard to Iran.”

PressTV: Senate panel votes to codify NSA spying into law

Israeli warplanes have attacked a "shipment of Russian missiles" inside a Syrian government stronghold, officials say, a development that threatened to add another volatile layer to regional tensions from the Syrian civil war. ● The revelation came as the government of President Bashar al-Assad met a key deadline in an ambitious plan to eliminate Syria's entire chemical weapons stockpile by mid-2014 and avoid international military action. The announcement by a global chemical weapons watchdog that the country has completed the destruction of equipment used to produce the deadly agents highlights Assad's willingness to cooperate, and puts more pressure on the divided and outgunned rebels to attend a planned peace conference. An Obama administration official confirmed the Israeli airstrike overnight, but provided no details. Another security official said the attack occurred late on Wednesday in the Syrian port city of Latakia and that the target was Russian-made SA-125 missiles. There was no immediate confirmation from Syria.

CNN: Israeli planes strike Syrian military base, U.S. official says
VoR: US official confirms Israeli planes strike on Syrian military base
Tony Cartalucci: Tel Aviv Regime Strikes Syria, Again

Funds would go toward procurement of Iron Dome and development of Arrow 3 and Magic Wand missile interception systems. ● The U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee has endorsed a $488 million increase in military aid to Israel, which would pay for Israel's procurement and development of additional rocket and missile interception systems. The committee last week approved the defense authorization bill proposal submitted by its chairman, California Republican Howard McKeon. According to the wording of the proposal, the U.S. will allocate another $268 million to Israel in 2014 for the development of two interception systems: the Arrow 3, which intercepts long-range missiles, and the Magic Wand, which intercepts medium-range missiles.

Australian embassies are being secretly used to intercept phone calls and data across Asia as part of a US-led global spying network, according to whistleblower Edward Snowden and a former Australian intelligence officer. The top secret Defence Signals Directorate operates the clandestine surveillance facilities at embassies without the knowledge of most Australian diplomats. The revelations come as the US has been left red-faced by news it has been eavesdropping on foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. US President Barack Obama is said to be on the verge of ordering a halt to spying on the heads of allied governments following the international outcry.

New York Times: Australia Said to Play Part in N.S.A. Effort

Peter Symonds: US, Australia face backlash over spy operations in Asia ■ Angry reactions yesterday to the Fairfax and Der Spiegel articles give a glimpse of the diplomatic storm that is brewing throughout Asia. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated: “China is severely concerned about the reports and demands a clarification and explanation.” Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea expressed serious concerns. ● Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa declared that his government “strongly protests” over the spying operation, which, if confirmed, would be “not only a breach of security, but also a serious breach of diplomatic norms and ethics.” Teuku Faizaisyah, a senior adviser to the Indonesian president, branded the “illegal ways of collecting information” as “highly unacceptable.” ● While Washington has exploited the “war on terror” as the pretext for its massive spying operations on rivals and allies alike, the NSA operations are clearly broad in scope. ● The latest exposures underline the central role of Australian spy agencies and bases to the NSA surveillance operations in Asia. Just as the present Coalition government, like the previous Labor government, is committed to opening Australian military bases to American forces in their build-up against China, so the ASD is completely integrated into the vast US electronic spy network.

Imagine being beaten to a pulp by a mafia hit-man. Your nose is broken and dribbling blood, your left eye is swollen shut, you may have broken ribs. Somehow, you manage to stand up. Just then, the hit-man produces an invoice for his services to the tune of $574. The only thing worse than being violently assaulted is being forced to pay for your own abuser’s time and effort. That’s what the NSA is like. According to a Cato blog post by Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, every American taxpayer is billed $574 per year to keep the NSA up and running.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the NSA’s biggest defenders, released what she calls an NSA “reform” bill today. Don’t be fooled: the bill codifies some of the NSA’s worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms. We urge members of Congress to oppose it. We learned for the first time in June that the NSA secretly twisted and re-interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act six years ago to allow them to vacuum up every phone record in America—continuing an unconstitutional program began in 2001. The new leaks about this mass surveillance program four months ago have led to a sea change in how Americans view privacy, and poll after poll has shown the public wants it to stop.

The Guardian: Senate committee backs bill that would allow NSA data collection to continue

As Professor of Meteorology Dr. Richard Lindzen at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences observed, “The latest IPCC report truly sank to the level of hilarious incoherence – it is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.” The banner claim of this 2013 Summary for Policymakers (AR5) release is that “Human influence is extremely likely to be dominant cause of observed warming since the middle of the last century.” This “extremely likely” was ratcheted up from “very likely” they claimed in their previous 2007 report. At the same time, the IPCC actually admitted that its 2007 report estimate of greenhouse gas influence had been significantly exaggerated. One can only wonder how they have become more confident that at least more than half of the temperature rise since the mid-20th century has been caused by greenhouse gas emissions, when at the same time they are less certain about climate sensitivity to CO2. Making life even more difficult for that climate cartel is having to explain why the global climate has flat-lined over at least the past 16 years despite increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, something they euphemistically refer to as a “pause”.