“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.
Unmanned combat drone. Image in public domain.
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
I wouldn’t put anything past the CIA–including masterminding the assassination of JFK.
Most friends just shrug and say Who cares when I ask them if they believed the Warren Commission’s report. As I understand it, the CIA’s secret files were supposed to be released this year, but they have again postponed it to 2017, by which time their operatives will doubtless be dead and beyond the reach of prosecution.
This report from Engaging Peace fearlessly addresses the criminal activities of that most ruthless branch of our government.
Kathie – The red drones shown in the picture accompanying your article are target drones, which have nothing to do with the story. (see e.g., “BQM-74_Chukar” in wikipedia). It’s a small point, perhaps; but in talking about the use of drones by the Obama Administration one has to be exceedingly precise; while there’s a lot to be concerned about, there’s also a lot of misinformation-driven hysteria. A case can be made that the Obama Administration opted for drone warfare precisely to save lives – which it has, compared to the policy of massive firepower of the previous administration which wreaked such
death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m defending neither the drone program nor (and especially) extrajudicial killing. Nor am I arguing against the idea that it’s better to save one innocent than kill one enemy. But I’m wondering that uncritically damning the drone program and implying that Obama is in the same class as Bush doesn’t help us see our way to ending both the program and the war.
US drone strikes–bombings of foreign countries thus far including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen (as far as we know)–were initiated during the Bush administration and expanded under the Obama administration (whose first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, was a hold-over from the Bush administration). In September 2012, The International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law issued a report titled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan.” From the Executive Summary and Recommendations (p. v), “In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling ‘targeted killing’ of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.1
“This narrative is false.” (http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Stanford-NYU-LIVING-UNDER-DRONES.pdf)
“Double tapping” is a critical tactic of US drone strikes that Americans need to understand:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yMOzvmgVhc
For more information, please visit livingunderdrones.org
Ed, thanks for pointing out the issue with the image. It’s now been replaced by a photo of an unmanned combat drone.
I was on MSN and came across this article: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/21/17398793-20-foot-orange-military-drone-found-floating-in-florida-keys?lite. I’m sure you’ve seen similar news like this but it reminded me of what you wrote in this blog post. I particularly enjoyed how light this article sounded despite the fact that we have drones “lost” … Visually speaking, I feel as if we’re all in one big playground and ‘toy aircrafts’ are being played around and dropped into the sand with no regard. It’s unsettling because it makes the world seem much smaller than it is and … creates an even more dominating image of the U.S to me. It’s a bit unsettling…who knows where we’ll find them next!