President Obama took the concept of an aerial attack by unmanned drone from a rare event to something exceedingly common. The architect of the drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen has launched hundreds of strikes, killing thousands of people, since taking office.
Something has happened though, as the US has made drone warfare the “new normal;” other nations started acquiring drones of their own. It’s not as funny when the other guy does it, so President Obama is now pushing global rules and standards on when drones can be used.
“People say what’s going to happen when the Chinese and the Russians get this technology. The president is well aware of these concerns and wants to set the standard for the international community on these tools,” the White House noted in a statement.
Yet America’s own standards for using drones have been ambiguous at best, with officials often refusing to comment on who they’ve killed, let alone why, and has spurned the idea of legal oversight for the killings.
If America has “set the standard” it is surely a bad one, and one can only assume the US will be outraged if Russia or China follows the trend and starts using drones to assassinate state enemies in other nations.
Domestic drone usage is ill-conceived, elitist, and end-runs our inherent Constitutional protections.
Here are two (2), very well-produced, videos that anchor my points:
Emmy Award-winning newscaster Shad Olson’s ‘The Great Drone Debate’, featuring US Senator John Thune:
Here’s a mind-blowing, well-done animated short that really captures our collective angst that if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then domestic drones are a superhighway to an Orwellian panoptic gulag.
For national security purposes, Americans are already subject to warrantless wiretaps of calls and emails, the warrantless GPS “tagging” of their vehicles, the domestic use of Predators or other spy-in-the-sky drones, and the Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of all our behavior through “data fusion centers.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsada…
America’s promise has always been the power of the many to rule, instead of the one. Ungoverned drone usage, particularly domestically, gives power to the one.
Drone enslavers
Since the beginning of civilization the super-intelligent rich have been looking for some magical “Tower of Babel,” some tool of universal slavery that will give them absolute rule over the working-class.
Comes now drone enslavers that make working-class rebellion impossible, for if you can kill off the leaders, all the rebellious will surely run around like chickens with their heads cut off. For less then 5% of a population ever get involved in any kind of rebellion and a time may soon come when any cop on the beat can push a button and assassinate an organizer with drones the size of your hat.
This headline is unsubstantiated. It is merely MSM stenography, as often happens here.
This headline is unsubstantiated. It is merely MSM stenography, as often happens here.
You know, I had prepared a rather sarcastic comment about this but I erased it. I'm too disgusted with my nation's government apparatchiks to even crack jokes about them any more.