Protocols exist allowing the president to select American citizens, without a whit of due process, for drone killing.
Only overseas, he says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported an aerial drone killing in San Bernardino, or at the Pulse club in Orlando? Didn’t many support using a robot to blow up a suspect in Dallas?
How soon before armed drones are over our heads?
Time Now.
North Dakota just legalized its police departments to equip drones with Tasers, tear gas and rubber bullets. The state legislature will push for the removal of the non-lethal force provision in 2017.
House Bill 1328 went into effect August 1. The original piece of legislation sought to ensure police obtained a search warrant to use a drone to gather criminal evidence. However, when a lobbyist with police ties was allowed to amend the bill, it was rewritten to specify that drones could carry anything except (’til next year) weapons capable of lethal force.
Of course plenty of people have died at the hands of police using so-called non-lethal weapons, Tasers in particular. But even if that is not a concern, just wait until 2017, when the police will be able to fly weaponized drones.
Over America. Or is it: Over, America?
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.
Empire Strikes Back quote time:
“The Emperor does not wish to damage his prize.” Thus this machine gets tested on ‘less than perfect’ candidates, e.g. the sub-humans that are the Nemesis de Jour®. The myth of exceptionalism will be shattered when people find out that they don’t matter anymore than those wicked undesirables they frothed and raged at yesterday.
As Russell Means liked to say, “Welcome to the Reservation”
Get over the big hoax of condemning drones. It’s only racist hate for Obama and will be gleefully accepted as necessary by the next rotten warmonger president. I mean, after all, if he wasn’t the black uppity guy everybody would easily understand that his drone warfare is killing far less people than would be slaughtered by the US when they use 1000 pounders on villages full of civilians. Racist blood thirsty creeps. All diseased by the libertarian plague.
Huh?
Paul,
I guess you haven’t run into Don G. before.
He’s an idiot who thinks that the people who elected Obama president twice hate him because he’s black, and who thinks that Obama is a “peace president” who’s not actually responsible for any of the several wars he has started or continued.
I’m using the word “thinks” in a very loose sense, of course.
If you could have stood your ground without banning me from the forum, you would have had a case. But you couldn’t. So even though you have been exposed as not being antiwar and just another raving libertarian lunatic, you have made yourself immune from hearing the truth.
The first time you were banned from one of the forums, it was not by me. In fact, it was over my protests.
The second time you were banned from the forums, it was after repeated warnings about lying about the staff of Antiwar.com.
You’re not special, other than perhaps special needs.
Thomas, it’s you that’s lying about me lying about the staff of antiwar.com. In any case, voicing an opinion on Raimondo supporting Trump has to be what you are referring to. Why the fu-k would anybody care?
It doesn’t matter Thomas, Commondreams can tolerate hearing the truth and the facts and I don’t really want back on this site which is censored by the powers that be. Check it out! They don’t seem to have anybody to protect and the writers they publish are quite mainstream and rational in their approaches. While you get Raimondo and false hope in little Lucy ever amounting to something. When you grow out of the libertarian pie in the sky bullshit, maybe real antiwar sites will come to be of interest to you.
“I don’t really want back on this site”
Wish granted. Bye!
Is barring someone from conversation an effective way of promoting discussion? I am new to commenting here, but its kind of worrisome to see someone banned for stating an opinion (even if it is an unpopular or ill-formed opinion).
He wasn’t banned for stating an opinion.
OH, and don’t be afraid of losing Paul. His ‘huh’ should have told you that he’s another empty bottle who is motivated by racist hate.
To be fair, a lot of the criticism from the lumpenproletariat is (if the person speaking assumes that all listeners are white) will involve race. Of course that’s not ALL criticism.
BlackAgendaReport has plenty to say on that.
And, btw, Obama is more white than me.
Also I do such heinous non-elitist stuff like riding buses and congregating with other Medicaid insured cripples at the waiting rooms of subsidized clinics.
It’s what we do. I recently got my VA benefits so I get to loiter at the VA too. And, being not very picky about with whom I break bread (grammar check?) I also spend time with rich people. The point being that a) Rich people are just as prone to racism as the poorest, and b) why would that matter either way in considering that Obama has continued the warmongering spree that has infested America since before the Revolution?
During the 7 Year War Colonel Jeffery Amherst admitted to using Biological Agents against Native American. For his punishment he had a town in New Jersey and a college named for him.
I took it as some sort of sarcasm, but apparently not…so ….huh? ; )
You’re a Canuck. Elect your own half-black premier before you wag your finger at us ‘racists’. And also, STFU.
Then we would understand? Right Jim. It’s not often you Klansmen blow your cover so completely and admit to it.
Um, I think he’s saying exactly the opposite. He’s saying, if we’re so racist, how come we have a black president and Canada has not?
You’re kind of blinded by your assumptions. It doesn’t help your case.
It is ambiguous, much like the ancestry of Mr Obama. So why the “half black” routine? DNA shows we all have African roots. And the Bible if any care to examine that record.
And Canadians have been in the Koalition of the Killing, and are deeply affected by the Wonder-Blunders of Washinton DC, so the Canuck reference… eh.
The continuing point is that warmongering, wars against civilian populations and indiscriminate use of what I as a southerner would illustrate as Shotgun Shack tactics.
We still have them around, the shacks. They were also called slave cabins and up north Servants Quarters.
They’re called that because the two or three rooms are in a straight line, if you stuck a shotgun in one door and hit the trigger, you’d get all three rooms
Indiscriminate. The fact that they’ll be used in the US well, the incident in Dallas involved a modification of the same concept. And was used to remote controlled killed a Black American.
I think, maybe I’m wrong but I’ll say it anyway, racial descriptors of the parties involved is probably not a good start, end or middle of the conversation.
The promised Drone strike on Assange, you might notice that his skin and hair are kind of pale. So is Hillarys . And as Simon points out, Trump has vowed to use them domestically. For immigration control. And unarmed at first. That policy is already in place.
Summation: The political options are:
damned if we do
and damned if we don’t.
I don’t think that you are misaligned. It’s true people seem to condone the antics and background of the Bush family, a more traditional American president. It is preferable to blame Pres. Obama because of his mixed race background. Greed, pride and corruption are packaged in all colors.
A public service reminder that trump wants to give predator drones to the border patrol. Of course they won’t be armed at first either.