A new Amnesty International report about U.S. drone use in the war on terror says that the drone campaign is killing so many civilians, that it does not only violate international law, but may be a war crime. The report also says that the growing use of drones by the United States in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia encourages their use by other states and groups. The United States rejects the figures of civilian casualties cited in the Amnesty report as unreliable, and says that the research methodology the report’s authors used is deeply flawed. The United States does agree, however, that there is a reason to worry about the proliferation of drone technology. “Going forward this is a technology that we know more people will probably get access to,” a State Department spokeswoman said.

Court documents filed in the case of Basaaly Moalin, a San Diego cab driver of Somali origin accused of aiding al Shabab, reveal that the 2008 killing by a CIA drone strike of al Shabab leader Aden Hashen Ayrow was aided by information collected by the NSA metadata collection program. The NSA was able to pinpoint Ayrow’s real-time location by tracking calls between him and Moalin. Lawyers for Moalin are appealing the conviction on grounds that he was unconstitutionally targeted by the NSA’s surveillance program.

In a 60 Minutes segment aired yesterday (Sunday), former vice-president Dick Cheney told the interviewer that his doctors turned off the wireless function of his implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD) “in case a terrorist tried to send his heart a fatal shock.” Asked about the concern of Cheney’s physicians, electrophysiologists — these are the cardiologists who implant ICDs – say that as far as they know, this has never happened in the real world but that it is impossible to rule out the possibility.

A scientific study calculating Iraqi deaths for almost the complete period of the U.S.-led war and subsequent occupation estimates, with 95 percent of statistical certainty, that the total excess Iraqi deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011 to be about 405,000 (“excess” death means death not related to natural causes or causes other than the war and occupation). The researchers also estimated that an additional 56,000 deaths were not counted due to migration. Including this number, their final estimate is that close to half a million people died in Iraq as a result of the war and subsequent occupation from March 2003 to June 2011.

Yasser Arafat died in November 2004 in a French hospital after rapid deterioration in his condition. He was 75 years old, but in good condition, and Palestinian and French doctors could not identify the reason for his decline. Even before he died, Palestinian leaders spread the rumor that he was poisoned on the orders of then-Prime Minister Arik Sharon of Israel. Last year, the Palestinian Authority agreed to a request by Arafat’s widow, Suha, and French judicial investigators to exhume his body for further tests. Tissues were harvested and were examined, along with some of Arafat’s personal effects, by Swiss, French, and Russian scientific teams. The Swiss team published its report this weekend in the leading medical journal The Lancet, saying that traces of the radioactive polonium-210 were found on some of Arafat’s personal effects, but not in his body tissues. The Swiss team uses suggestive language – the evidence they found “support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning with polonium-210” and that his symptoms in the weeks before he died “might suggest radioactive poisoning” – but admit that the absence of evidence of polonium-210 in body tissues makes it impossible to say with certainty that Arafat was poisoned. The Russian scientists are more definitive. “He could not have died of polonium poisoning — the Russian experts found no traces of this substance,” Vladimir Uiba, the head of Russia’s Federal Medical-Biological Agency, said earlier today (Tuesday).

Botulinum neurotoxins are produced by Clostridium botulinum and cause the possibly fatal disease botulism, which impedes nerve cells’ ability to communicate with muscles and can lead to paralysis and respiratory failure. The botulinum toxin has also been identified as a potential biological weapon against a civilian population. Scientists have decoded a key molecular gateway for the toxin that causes botulism, pointing the way to treatments that can keep the food-borne poison out of the bloodstream.

Beate Zschäpe, the last surviving members of the National Socialist Underground, a violent German neo-Nazi group, is on trial this month for taking part in the murders of eight Turkish immigrants, one Greek man, and a German policewoman, in addition to participating in fifteen bank robberies and two bomb attacks. In testimony Monday, a police investigator said that computer files found in an apartment used by NSU member indicate that in 2002, the group was working on a plot to assassinate the then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

The Obama administration had dramatically increased the use of drones in the war against terrorists. The number of drone strike has declined this year relative to the high levels of 2010-11. The number of drone strikes may increase again, but this past weekend’s Special Forces raids in Somalia and Libya are an indication that the next phase in the U.S. war on terrorism would see, in relative terms, less of a reliance on CIA-operated drones and a greater role for the Pentagon.

Three African Islamist terrorist organizations — al-shabaab, al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, and Boko Haram – have been responsible for many acts of terrorism. The three groups, or at least their leaders and most of their followers, adhere to a Wahhabi version of Islam, which is practiced in Saudi Arabia, and all oppose Western influence in the countries in which they operate. The groups also share a penchant for internal factional violence, and senior leaders of both al Shabab and Boko Haram were recently killed by rivals. There are, however, important differences among the three groups.