Tag Archives: Drones

Usual Rubbish

Dronetastic.

Wait a minute. Here they come again! Everybody DOWN! Damn it. Okay, that was just a pizza delivery to the neighbors. You can all stand up again.

Oh, hi. Kind of caught us at a bad time, actually. We are in the midst of a coordinated drone attack. No, not the military kind they use overseas. These are domestic drones of the kind you can buy at the corner store. As you may have heard, there are now hundreds of thousands of these suckers. The skies are black with them. One flock covers three whole states, and when they move … oh, it’s like THUNDER! (No, wait … that was the buffalo, as described by a space archeologist on Star Trek. Sorry.)

Now, when I say “attack”, I don’t exactly mean they are targeting us. It’s just that there are so freaking many of these things, it starts to feel like an assault after a while. The pizza delivery joint down the street is using one. So is the florist. And last week our nasty neighbors bought one for their fourteen year old, and the first thing the little sucker did with it was drop a water balloon on the man-sized tuber. (Actually, he rather likes that in as much a there hasn’t been a lot of rain lately … but that’s not the point!)

Whoa, Tubey ... heads up.The ones that really annoy me are those mosquito-sized drones. I don’t even know how they manage to engineer a flying machine that tiny. Where do they find bicycle parts small enough to make that thing fly? They somehow even designed them so that they can replicate themselves by dropping little developmental nodules into standing water, which later hatch and …. hey … or maybe those are just mosquitoes. Okay, um … forget that last bit.

I should put out notice to our neighbors that their new-found obsession with drone technology is a bit like whacking a hornet’s nest with a stick. They need to be reminded that we have a mad scientist in residence by the name of Mitch Macaphee. He hasn’t taken much notice of the flying machines thus far, buried as he is in his laboratory. But I think it’s just a matter of time, frankly. And yes, he is the designer of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), but don’t let that fool you. Not all of his inventions are non-threatening lumps of useless technology. (Sorry, Marvin.)

Political Rants

No negotiations.

There’s more news of drone deaths, this time including western hostages. “Mistakes can occur”, president Obama says, employing the passive voice as his predecessor Ronald Reagan often did. The American captive, aid worker Warren Weinstein, had asked his government to work toward negotiating his release, to no avail. We do not make deals with “terrorists”. Unlike during practically every war our country has been involved in previously, in the context of the “Global War on Terror”, prisoner release negotiations have been barred, whether on the part of the United States government or by private parties, such as the families of the captives. Thus, no release, and ultimately, death by drone.

Chief hostage negotiatorWhat brought this policy about? Perhaps it’s the experience of, again, Reagan and the fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal. The official line at that time was, “we will not negotiate with terrorists”, but the effort towards back-channel negotiations became clear as the story unfolded. Of course, context is important, it seems to me. Back in the eighties, we were deeply involved in the Lebanese civil war, both directly and through Israel’s invasion – that was the proximate cause of the capture of westerners in Lebanon. We were also supporting Iraq’s murderous war against Iran, which no doubt accounts for Iran’s interest in negotiating for arms with American representatives. And then there’s the Contra side of the ledger. Against that bloody backdrop, negotiating for captives seems pretty minor.

As far as I can tell, in every American conflict since the end of World War II, we have referred to our enemies as terrorists. We certainly did it in Vietnam. It’s a pretty simple principle – the other side kills, as do we, but their violence is worse than ours. Ours is justified, even if it’s way beyond the scale of the violence practiced by our adversaries. And so, we express regret when our flying killer robots accidentally blows up an American. No such courtesy when we incinerate nameless Pakistanis, etc.

As in previous conflicts, terrorism is in the eyes of the beholder. Which is why barring negotiations over captives is so nonsensical. If we did it before, we can do it now.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Kill zones.

Back when I was knee high to an antelope, in the scented 1960s, the U.S. was engaged in what is now described as “limited war” in Vietnam. Our concept of limitation is, well, somewhat limited, as it amounted to an all-out attack on Vietnamese society, particularly in the South Vietnam hinterlands, which took the brunt of the bombing, defoliation, and other depredations. Part of that policy was establishment of “Free-fire zones” – when night fell and the friendlies were inside the wire of the strategic hamlet, anything that moved beyond the wire was fair game. Hence the shooting, the bombing, etc.

This is our target?Our drone war in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and essentially everywhere else, runs on a similar principle. It isn’t as all-out, of course, but it appears to be nearly as random. And just as every living thing in the Vietnamese countryside was assumed to be Viet Cong, every military age male in the tribal areas of Pakistan is, by definition, an extremist, a combatant, a terrorist, and therefore the target of killer drones, piloted by some dude who works at a terminal in a trailer about fifty miles from where I’m sitting right now.

That definition of “military aged male” appears to be expansive enough to include the 67-year-old grandmother of Rafiq Rehman, a school teacher in North Waziristan. She was killed by a drone-fired  missile while tending her crop. (Rehman and his family were interviewed on Democracy Now! a couple of weeks ago.)

This policy is not only criminal, it’s stupid, unless of course the objective is to generate future conflicts. People in these tribal areas live under the buzz of killer drones every day of their lives. There is simply no telling when you, your father, your daughter, your best friend will be blown to bits at random by an unaccountable power, an out-of-control empire pressing its advantage against people who cannot defend themselves against this deadly technology. As an American of a certain age, I grew up under the threat of nuclear war. There was a sense of danger that attended every day of my generation’s childhood. This drone war is much more tangible, much more immediate, but psychologically corrosive in a similar way.

We are investing in a generation of people who hate our guts. We need to stop this now.

luv u,

jp