A kind word turneth away wrath

Drone strikes. Another one of those things we like to oppose for reasons with holes in them.  Malala Yousafzai, the young Nobel Peace Prize winner told the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner last Friday that drone strikes fuel terrorism and kill innocent people.  Somehow I recollect the saying that being against bad doesn't make you good.  It doesn't make you make sense either.

Is it the use of an unmanned vehicle that makes bombing terrorist targets wrong?  Would we be better off  using billion dollar manned vehicles that are less accurate and far more risky for US personnel?  Send in another 100,000 troops?   Would we be better off not doing anything and as she suggests just give Pakistan more money for "Education" in the phantasmagoric hope that it will somehow not be used to teach Islamic intolerance for so much of what we hold dear, including freedom for young women like Malala Yousafzai?  Surely that would work as well as the billions and billions and billions we're already given them while they housed bin Laden. 

Drone strikes, like Gluten and fruit sugar, is an enemy without portfolio and it's not surprising to hear it from someone hoping that somehow the insanity and hatred infesting Islamic culture will simply go away if we ignore it, or at most address al Qaeda and ISIS and the Taliban with a little more understanding.  Maybe they'll see the error of their ways if  we all are just a little more patient. 

About Drone Attacks, Politics, and Joshua Black

Maybe it's something in the water down in Florida. On Monday, while most of us were celebrating the Dr. King holiday, Joshua Black, a candidate for a seat in the Florida House (District 68) tweeted that President Obama should be hanged for treason, "I'm past impeachment. It's time to arrest and hang him high."

Black subsequently tweeted denials that he called for hanging the President, insisting that he merely agreed with a tweet posted by someone else. Of course the tweet with which he agreed advocated arresting and hanging the President. He also addressed how he has been misunderstood on his Facebook page.

Mr. Black is a 31-year-old African-American. On his Twitter account he has reacted with indignation to some suggestions that the tweet in controversy is racist. Upon giving it some thought, I am willing to concede that Mr. Black's attack on President Obama, his agreement with the tweet calling for the arrest and hanging of the President, may not be based on racial animosity. Mr. Black isn't a racist; he's just an idiot.

He appears desperate to curry favor from the Republican party in the belief that he will be the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House for District 68. His efforts aren't working. Chris Latvala, a Republican candidate for House District 67, tweeted a response: "You aren't seriously calling for the killing of Obama are you? I know you are crazy but good heavens. U R an embarrassment." On his Facebook page, Black alleges that Florida's governor has contacted him and asked him to withdraw from the race. Black refused, "Having done nothing illegal, I will not be withdrawing from this race. If I lose, I lose, but I will not cower away." 

What elicited Black's agreement with the tweet that President Obama should be hanged? According to Black, the President is guilty of treason, a modern incarnation of Benedict Arnold (Contrary to Black's belief, Arnold was not executed; he died at the age of 60 in his own bed.) He is emphatic that the President should have a trial first, then we should hang him. Black points specifically at two drone attacks in which two American citizens, a father and son were killed, the son was 16-years-old. A sad and nasty affair, in which the father, Anwar al-Awlaki, had taken his son with him to Yemen where the father worked with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Two weeks after the father was killed in a targeted drone strike, his son was also a victim of a drone strike. The administration has stated that the son was not a target and was an unintended victim of the second attack. 

Black seems particularly concerned about what he views as Obama's criminal attacks on American citizens, and calls on Jesus as justification for killing Obama for the crime of treason. There would be a bit of dark humor in the rantings of a novice who has never before held a public office if it weren't for the Tea Party members who are gleefully celebrating Black's attack on the President, offering praise for the black man speaking out against the President and in doing so, somehow prohibiting any characterization of the rabid right's ongoing attack against the president as racist. 

I find it fascinating how there is so much outrage at the use of drones by this administration and how little outrage has been expressed in the past when the U.S. has engaged in creative methods of killing that have resulted in substantial deaths of men, women, and children. 

I don't like war, whether declared by Congress or entered into based on a lie at worst or at best, massive misinformation about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or some other imagined threat.  People die in wars because everyone involved uses weapons to kill each other. War is about killing. Amazing how outraged people who had no problems with previous administrations killing people, including civilians, are willing to go so far as to call for the hanging of the president of the United States for alleged war crimes. Of course he is the first black president. But wait, I'm just imagining that his race has anything to do with it. 

After all, there has never been another U.S. president who ordered the military to take military action against our perceived enemy. Oops, I'm wrong. There was Truman and I'm certain that Obama's critics would also want Truman lynched. Under Truman's orders, on August 6, 1945, the United States used a massive, atomic weapon against Hiroshima, Japan. This atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, flattened the city, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Three days later, the United States struck again, this time, on Nagasaki. This was the big bang but the U.S. had been bombing cities in Japan for some time wiping out cities of 100,000 with conventional bombs. Rumor has it that subsequent Presidents ordered military actions that killed civilians in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan. Then there were the wars prior to WWII.

War is a nasty, evil thing and by its very definition it results in deaths, hundreds of thousands of deaths. Obama didn't start this trend and he won't be the last president to order strikes that result in the deaths of civilians, the young and the old, and even American citizens who happen to be giving aid to countries that are waging terrorists attacks against the U.S.

I don't like the U.S. use of military might and I believe that we have failed to devote sufficient effort to using diplomatic channels to resolve differences among nations. I support a stronger UN with the authority to resolve disputes among disagreeing countries. 

I reiterate: I don't like war. But what I like even less are hypocrites who look for any excuse to declare that President Obama is evil personified, the anti-Christ president, all under the pretext of being appalled at his exercise of the same powers as every commander-in-chief that has preceded him. Such hypocrites aren't anti-war; they're anti-Obama. They are so shallow that they cannot bring themselves to confront their own animus toward his position as President of the United States. They get hyperactive about his use of military force as if he invented the concept. Frankly, I have more respect for the blatant racists who don't hide their beliefs. At least they're honest and I know not to waste my time on attempting to communicate with them.

As for Joshua Black, he's seeking his 15 minutes of fame. Let's hope that his moment in the spotlight is over.

We are not alone

We're going to have to get used to drones.  They're available everywhere and getting better and cheaper as electronic toys do. HD TV cameras can be added that are now tiny and lightweight and cheap and can even see in the dark

I hope we don't have to get used to the constant surveillance they make possible and it's not just the invasion of our private spaces by government agencies I'm alarmed about.  Various people and groups of people with all kinds of ideas about what you're doing, aren't doing and should be doing are now able to watch and record from hundreds of feet above wherever you are.

PETA, one of those well-intentioned groups whose sentimentally extremist views about things like the personhood and civil rights of insects isn't the kind of  organization I want watching me if I'm out in the woods or down at the dock fishing seeing as for them, fish are sensitive and loving and self aware creatures and catching them is murder. But hunters are evil too as are those with leather shoes or eating sushi and PETA intends to   "monitor those who are out in the woods with death on their minds," according to a press release.  Those feral hogs we have here need to be protected against my violating their civil rights as well, and what about the local butcher shops!  Death on their minds! But according to the FAA, as long as you fly your Hammacher Schlemmer drone below 400 feet, there's no problem with areal reconnaissance. For extremists, kooks, voyeurs and fanatics, it's a whole new day.

"The average person has no worries" is the kind of  'reassurance' one expects from advocates of random and warrantless stops and searches.  Steve Hindi, president of yet another animal rights group called Showing Animals Respect and Kindness, or SHARK, assures us we have nothing to fear from him unless you have death on your mind.  He likes to watch bird hunters and post video on line and sending links to law enforcement. Perhaps the average hunter has no worries but what looks like one thing may look like another thing from a TV camera from 40 stories in the air and after all, Steve doesn't want you hunting in the first place you evil carnivore Bambi murderer you.

Of course flying your drone a few hundred feet above people with shotguns has it's hazards. Drones have suffered mysterious failures and there's a lot of giggling going on in the bird shooting community.  Might be some mirth in my back yard as well should there be an unidentified flying object hovering over my swimming pool, but I'm not sure the future doesn't hold endless drones over our heads and perhaps under our feet making sure we don't have aces up our sleeves or that we're not walking on the grass or filling out our golf score cards improperly or actually are playing cards with the guys like we said.  But let he who is without sin not worry, right?

Drones are the future.  Insurance companies are already 'offering' gadgets that record how fast you drive -- to save you money of course, but also to deny claims because you might have been observed at 5 over the limit.  Red light cameras don't seem to reduce collisions at intersections and may actually be causing more, but hey, you have nothing to fear in our brave new world where you have so many big brothers watching our for you.

Droning on and on

I usually describe myself, when it comes up, as a born-again liberal: I was one of Rush Limbaugh's original audience, back when he started out on KFBK out of Sacramento.

The Trophy Wife spent the first years of our marriage dragging me out of Neanderthal status and up to a level where I wasn't flinging poo and grunting, and I was probably almost there, when George Bush sent me to Iraq. I got back, and started noting the discrepancies: the "weapons of mass destruction," the central argument in favor of invading Iraq, not only didn't exist, but the evidence that they did was openly fabricated.

Yes, to be honest, Iraq had once had chemical weapons which they'd used on their own people. We knew that, because we sold it to them.



Saddam and his government were cooperating with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, when Bush finally pulled out the inspectors and invaded anyway.

As I learned more and more, I reached a point in 2004 when my wife came home to find me in tears. It had finally come home to me that George Bush had made us a rogue nation, and we'd invaded another country just because we wanted something from them. Exactly as Saddam had in the first Gulf War. (Admittedly, the tears might have been helped along by the lingering remains of the weakest case of PTSD on record, but there it is.)

But overall, I'll admit publicly to being what Stephanie Miller calls a "happy-clappy liberal." I think Obama has done great things, despite a Congress full of Republicans who would rather watch the country burn than let our first black president succeed.

I like that he dismantled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." I had a number of good friends in the military who happened to be gay, and their life was not a happy one.

I like that he managed to get health-care reform started, so that poor people don't have to die in pain. Despite what Fox "News" wants you to believe, Obama has managed to do a lot of very important things in the face of uninterrupted Republican obstruction.

I've got to say, though, that of all the policies Obama's put in place, the one I disagree with the most is the badly-targeted killing of civilians using unmanned drones. It reeks of Orwellian CIA assassinations: the actions of a corrupt dictator, killing his enemies with impunity.

I'm also a realist. I understand why it's being done. We do have enemies around the world (moreso since we burned down big chunks of the Middle East), and they would like nothing more than to score a symbolic victory by killing a good-sized group of Americans. But I also believe in these weird foreign concepts like habeas corpus, and "innocent until proven guilty."

I think that murder is a bad thing. So the whole subject leaves me a little torn.

In the end, though, I see nothing good about drone strikes. Are you aware that only one out of every fifty people killed by drones have been terrorists? Instead, we're killing wedding guests, innocent schoolchildren, people attending funerals, or even rescue workers:

Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders.

I understand the popularity of the program: no US forces are in any danger of being harmed. But somewhere along the line, we seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture: we're murdering innocent people.

But Democrats don't want to say bad things about Obama, and this program is the only thing Obama does that the GOP actually supports. So nothing gets done.

Weirdly enough, American bigotry is suddenly showing itself to have a stronger moral base than the American government. As long as the deaths were just foreigners and Muslims, nobody cared. But when word got out that the US government was also killing Americans, the possible backlash might just cause the government to rethink their policy.

(The idiot end of the political spectrum, of course, feels an obligation to overreact to this, as it does to everything that the Kenyan usurper does: they're already shrieking about "Drone strikes on American soil!!"

To be honest, if it makes the US rethink its drone program, I don't mind the overreaction this time.

War and Efficiency: Unintended Consequences?

A Facebook friend posted a link to a news story about the use of drones (unmanned aircraft) in warfare, War By Remote Control: Drones Make It Easy.

Warfare used to be a bloody, up close affair. Men killed other men. Death was instantaneous for many and serious wounds eventually resulted in death for most others. 

Now, war is too much like a video game. We have improved our methods of killing; invented weapons that can do maximum damage to other human beings from a great physical distance and left us able to distance ourselves emotionally from an enemy that is a blip on a screen. We can kill people whose faces we never see; we no longer have to wait until we see the whites of their eyes to fire on them. There is no sense of connection that the enemy breathes, loves, and lives just as we do, nothing to make us question war itself.  We've made it so much easier to kill and so much easier to wash our hands of that killing. Ironic that in a nation that prides itself on being Christian, we've collectively become Pontius Pilate.

For today's Americans, who haven't had a modern war on American soil, war is a distant entity, brought home only when the wounded men and women, now saved due to advances in modern medicine, return to their families. The rest of us feel momentary sympathy for the wounded vets who return missing body parts and who are emotionally battered and damaged, but we forget them pretty soon. When we lie down in our beds, there are no drones flying  in the dark over our heads.

Vietnam was the last war (technically a police action) that we had to fully feel and experience. The media was filled with Vietnam. We knew that the average age of the soldiers in Vietnam was 19. We knew how many died each day. We saw their flag draped coffins on the evening news. A lot of us didn't like war and we protested against it. We flashed peace symbols, sang protest songs, and marched in solidarity against  not just the Vietnam War, but any war.

We have lost the urgency to prevent war or to put an end to existing wars. Our collective conscience has become as removed from the horrors of war as the remote mechanisms that we use to fight wars. War should be messy and painful. It should make us lose sleep at night. War must be atrocious enough to repulse us, to make us be willing to go to any means necessary to put an end to warfare. The automation of efficient killing makes it far easier to engage in warfare and that's the problem.