[Vision2020] drones

[Sunil Ramalingam]

I agree with you. There isn't any authority to pursue this and yet people just accept it. I was debating this with a high school classmate who is very far right. There are no domestic policies where he will support Obama, or believe a word he says. But he's behind this policy. He doesn't need proof, he says just go kiill them.

Democrats have sanctioned this since Obama took power, and now it's a bipartisan policy. Makes it clear that many protests while Bush was President were political, not rooted in principle. And the only Republican running for president who opposed this was Ron Paul, who was marginalized for his domestic policies. There was no real analysis of what he was saying about foreign policy, where we could have had an important discussion about the issue.

Underlying all this are a number of things. First, people keep saying 'We're at war,' but they don't say that it's a war that apparently will go on forever. Will these powers ever be restrained? Not if the executive wants to hang on to the power, and the People refuse to challenge him on this. Second, shouldn't we be asking 'Why do we have bases around the world? Is this an Empire? Why do we have one? What does it cost us? What else could we be doing with that money?'

Sunil

> Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:45:01 -0800
> From: godshatter at yahoo.com
> To: Vision2020 at moscow.com
> Subject: [Vision2020] drones
> 
> Now that we seem to be done chortling over local people protesting 
> something peacefully, I thought maybe we could talk about the whole 
> drone program.
> 
> First of all, I can't get past the lack of due process.  There are no 
> trials, not even the kind of for-show trials you'd expect to see in 
> third-world tinpot dictatorships.  We are not at war with any of the 
> countries in which we have been killing these people in.  There are no 
> attempts I've seen to work with Yemen and Pakistan to bring these people 
> in for trial.  According to a Stanford law professor I was listening to 
> on NPR a little while ago, our President signs off on all the drone 
> strikes of specific individuals, which account for about 2% of the drone 
> strikes that happen.  The other 98% are people that they can't identify 
> that appear to be terrorists doing whatever it is that terrorists do.  
> There are whole communities in NW Pakistan that have drones flying 
> overhead and nobody knows what sorts of behavior their remote pilots are 
> looking for in order to strike, causing them to keep their kids at home 
> and has led to PTSD amongst their populace.  We are in effect 
> terrorizing those communities ourselves.
> 
> This whole program is just simply wrong on so many levels I can't even 
> believe we as a country would entertain such an idea.  Oh, yeah, this 
> "oversight" came about only because they thought that Romney was about 
> to become President.  Talk about looking ahead.
> 
> As for drone technology itself, I'd rather see the use of drones for 
> precision strikes rather than having to put boots on the ground, but 
> only in times where we can actually legally put boots on the ground and 
> give our troops that kind of assignment.
> 
> I think we're running into what I think of as the taser problem. Tasers 
> were supposed to be a non-lethal weapon that would be used when all 
> other choices were exhausted.  Instead of replacing the need for a cop 
> to shoot someone, they replaced the need for a cop to whack someone on 
> the head with their night stick.  This is the same thing.  They are so 
> easy, no one we apparently think of as human dies, and the drone 
> operators can turn their consoles off at the end of their shift and go 
> have a nice dinner at the Olive Garden.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Paul
> 
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