Tag Archives: Drones

We Don’t Torture Them Now – We Kill Them Instead

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American insanity isn’t limited to Republicans or Republican-sympathizers, of course. For example, President Obama may have curtailed our use of torture, but he’s expanded our use of drones. From The Atlantic:

A report from the CIA’s inspector general [in 2004] had raised the possibility that the CIA’s interrogation techniques violated the UN Convention Against Torture, and that individual officers might be liable for criminal prosecution. That torture report … “was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.”

The difficulty in keeping terrorism suspects locked up indefinitely without access to the regular judicial system gave our government an additional reason to kill them instead of capturing them. The result has been more drone attacks:

Though the U.S. drone war started under Bush …, Obama has ramped it up considerably in his half-decade in office. [According to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama] has authorized over nine times as many strikes as his predecessor… Estimates of the precise number of fatalities in those operations range widely; Zenko’s own tally, based on reporting from non-governmental research organizations, puts the rough death toll at around 3,500 people. These include an unknown number of civilian casualties believed by independent researchers to number at least in the hundreds….Tuesday’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, lists 119 terror suspects known to have been detained by the CIA, of whom “at least 39 were subject to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques”….

But despite the vast disparity in the numbers of people abused through the CIA’s detention program versus killed by drones, there has been no official accounting of the latter program on par with the torture report released this week. “[Those] normally interested in upholding human rights ideals and promoting transparency (generally Democrats) simply will not investigate their own,” Zenko explained. “And as I’ve pointed out, in every public opinion poll … Americans are more comfortable killing suspected terrorists than torturing them.”

As Andrea Tartaros of Fox News said the other day, “We are awesome!”.

No Wonder The Foreign Bastards Hate Us

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Some foreigners may hate us for “our freedoms”, as Bush the Younger once said. But many surely hate us, justifiably, for our willingness to kill recklessly and with minimal regret.

It hardly made the news here, but a few days ago our government attacked a “wedding convoy” in Yemen, murdering 14 people and maiming 22. At least three more have since died. Meanwhile, our government (including the Democrat in the White House) hasn’t commented.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf asks how we would react if something similar happened here:

Can you imagine the wall-to-wall press coverage, the outrage, and the empathy for the victims that would follow if an American wedding were attacked in this fashion? Or how you’d feel about a foreign power that attacked your wedding in this fashion? …  and all for the sake of five people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda.

We might as well be broadcasting a message worldwide on Voice of America: “We don’t give a shit about you foreign bastards”.

The whole article, which is brief, is worth reading, especially if you’re still proud to be an American. 

The Most Successful Hunters in the World?

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Biologists report that dragonflies capture their prey 95% of the time. That’s an amazing success rate. They’re such good hunters because they have huge eyes, four wings that move independently, and brains that allow them to track their prey as well as human hunters track theirs.

They’ve been successfully hunting for 300 million years. Our ancestors started walking on two legs about 6 million years ago.

Now, however, we’re letting our machines do the hunting (cf. the really cool drones in Oblivion, Tom Cruise’s latest). Much of the research on dragonflies is being sponsored by the Pentagon. 

This article includes more information and some impressive video (it’s hard to be a hungry frog):

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/science/dragonflies-natures-deadly-drone-but-prettier.html?src=me&ref=general