“Drones for America!,”a brief satiric video, will chill you, horrify you, and anger you. It will make you think very carefully about our government’s drone policy, its violation of constitutional principles, and its message to victims, their families, and the rest of the world.
Some of the identified cases of drone murders should also push you to act. Consider this one.
Leaders of the military-industrial complex who profit from wars are hoping that Americans won’t make the kind of fuss about drone warfare that they did about the Vietnam War, because drone warfare does not harm American service personnel. Or does it?
The arbitrary killing of Americans and others around the world, in violation of fundamental principles in our Bill of Rights, should be felt as keenly as the horrendous bloodbaths of the two world wars.
It’s not only the number of people who die in a war that is horrifying, but also the deliberate murder of human beings, particularly of innocent civilians who are simply trying to survive.
Still, the death count from drones, while not regularly reported by the news media, is gruesomely high.
Recently leaked documents reveal that the Justice Department gives the government a rather free hand in deciding who to kill.
Will you be able to sleep at night knowing that such a policy has been approved?
Like the now-obsolete weapons that lured militaries into trying out their new “toys” in World War I, drones are the latest in a series of deadly killing machines that threaten us all.
Learn about the drone killing of an American teenager and consider what can happen if ordinary people believe that there is nothing they can do about the violence being perpetrated by the power elite and those whom they have terrified.
In this Season of Nonviolence, we can be thankful that the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and Counterterrorism of the United Nations is investigating drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories.
If world peace is to be achieved, then all nations, without exception, must respect international conventions for human rights.
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology