Monday, May 28, 2012

Killing by remote control

Under George W. Bush, it was an Outrage! that the U.S. government was indefinitely imprisoning poor, innocent foreigners without so much as charging them with a crime. Under Barack Obama, killing poor, innocent foreigners without so much as charging them with a crime is now a mark of a Successful Foreign Policy, showing the president has the cojones to authorize mass murder based on an international stop and drone strike policy of profiling.

For the better part of four kind of depressing months, I returned to my old imperial stomping grounds in Washington, DC, to help research and write a book with Code Pink's Medea Benjamin on this new form of remote-controlled war, which has dramatically expanded under the Nobel-laureate-in-chief, killing hundreds if not thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (turns out precision isn't such a grand thing when you have no idea who precisely you're targeting). As Medea and I show, drones are not the revolutionary, life-saving tools they have been sold as to the American public, but merely the latest evolution of inherently indiscriminate air warfare, one that threatens to make war more sanitary for television audiences but no less bloody for the faultless men, women and children who always bear the brunt of state-sanctioned violence.

Buy it or find a torrent or something.

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