Taliban fighters or members of the Shabaab militia on the Horn of Africa with apparent clinical precision -- guided toward their targets via German soil

                     

The beast.....

 The documents, which originate from US intelligence sources and are classified as "top secret," date from July 2012. A diagram shows how the US government structures the deployment of drones. Other documents provide significant insight into how operations in places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen are carried out. And they show that a central -- and controversial -- element of this warfare is played out in Germany.

The graphics show that Ramstein is involved in virtually every Air Force drone attack. Even if the pilots are sitting at Air Force bases in Nevada, Arizona or Missouri, and even if the targets are located on the Horn of Africa or the Arab Peninsula, USAFE headquarters at Ramstein is almost always involved.

"Ramstein carries the signal to tell the drone what to do," says a US intelligence source, who is knowledgable about the US government's drone program. He declined to be identified because of fears of retribution. "Without Ramstein, drones could not function, at least not as they do now."


rom Ramstein into Space

The intelligence service diagrams reveal that there are two places in the world right now that are indispensable in the drone war: Ramstein and Creech, a hermetically sealed town in the Nevada desert. The Air Force base, one hour northwest of Las Vegas by car, serves as a relay hub for 10 Air Force bases in different US states. State-of-the-art fiber-optic cables guarantee the rapid transmission of data, which is also sent to the National Security Agency and to Ramstein in Germany.

The trans-Atlantic connection is vital, because every time a drone pilot in Creech begins his mission, he first logs into the Air and Space Operation Center (AOC) in Ramstein. Last year, former pilot Brandon Bryant reported that he used his personnel number to log in to the system in Germany and that he had to enter the identification number of the drone he was charged with flying in order to connect with the aircraft.

The secret documents that prove this are even more explosive in that they contradict the German government's position in an additional point as well. According to the documents, the drones are capable of geolocating mobile phones for their deadly attacks. In the past, the Germans would provide the mobile phone numbers of suspects to the Americans as part of their efforts to fight terror -- in Afghanistan, for example. The German government justified the practice by claiming that a mobile phone number by itself was not enough to enable a precision air strike.

But the secret documents show that drones equipped with a special geolocating device are able to use mobile phone numbers to locate people precisely enough to make an air strike possible. The system is called "Gilgamesh" and it is screwed onto the bottom side of a drone's wing. It simulates a mobile phone tower for suspicious numbers. If a target phone logs on to Gilgamesh instead of a standard cell tower, its precise location can be determined. The drone then transfers the data back to Ramstein via satellite.

The air base, which has attracted some 50,000 US citizens to live in the region, already played a prominent role in the very early stages of the US drone war. In his book "Predator," American author Richard Whittle wrote that, during the summer of 2000, the most important drone flights to that date were commanded out of Ramstein. In the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the as-yet unarmed drones were used to find the camps and whereabouts of his terrorist clan in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Under the greatest secrecy, a satellite station was transported to Ramstein and positioned at the end of the air base runway. They succeeded in tracking bin Laden near Kandahar during the seventh drone flight. Whittle claims that the White House did not inform the German government about the operation.

When a version of the Predator armed with "Hellfire" missiles was ready for deployment only a year later, the Americans presumed they would continue to control the aircraft from Germany. The location had proven itself, not least because the infrastructure could be easily disguised on the giant property.

But Pentagon legal experts expressed concern about dispatching the deadly drones from Ramstein without the knowledge of the German government. The lawyers cited the legal obligations laid out in the US Forces Agreement and warned of possible diplomatic and legal consequences. The Americans didn't want to risk a veto from the left-leaning government coalition of then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats and the Green Party or, worse yet, a situation in which the plans might somehow become public. So they began searching for alternatives, ultimately adopting an American technical expert's idea to physically separate the pilots from the satellite connections.

Since then, the Americans have felt they were legally safe, but many experts view the situation differently.

Still, few international law experts in Europe, and few experts in the foreign ministries of NATO allies, are prepared to accept a US view according to which the entire planet is seen as a theater of war in a conflict where it has an unlimited license to kill.

Whatever the US military is doing at Ramstein, it is the "independent, sovereign action of a foreign state," which requires no permit and no review. "It cannot be the duty of the defendant to act as a 'global prosecutor' towards other sovereign states,"