Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Things unspoken

Oh the debates are finally over...and now the spin will last another couple days, affix metaphorical boynets. Thank goodness. Too bad there wasn't enough talk about the spread of our most successful civilian killing policy other than mutual agreement:
The UK is to double the number of armed RAF "drones" flying combat and surveillance operations in Afghanistan and, for the first time, the aircraft will be controlled from terminals and screens in Britain.
So Cameron, et al, want to get in on the action.
The CIA's programme of "targeted" drone killings in Pakistan's tribal area was last month condemned in a report by US academics. The attacks are politically counterproductive, kill large numbers of civilians and undermine respect for international law, according to the study by Stanford and New York universities' law schools.
Oh sure, they're all those things...but they are good at killing on the cheap and allow us the pretension of not being "messy" (on our end). And we've seemed to have had it decided for us that nothing bad can come of it.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

2 comments:

Montag said...

Quite true, but, we've always had blinders on when it comes to assessing our actions in the rest of the world, and when things do blow up in our face (as they inevitably will), our emphasis is never on correcting the underlying mistake, but, rather, attacking the messenger, spinning violently and expending huge sums of time, money and energy on finding ways to do the same ill-considered things without the public noticing.

And the Brits taught us a lot about how to do such things, because they might have well as invented them.

pansypoo said...

so they would prefer carpet bombing? or invasion?