Wednesday, February 01, 2012

From the Guardian:

With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war
As technology allows machines to make their own decisions, warfare will become bloodier – and less accountable



These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind's abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, which is running the undeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties. So does Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan. It is a blatant whitewash.

As a report last year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed, of some 2,300 people killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 until August 2011, between 392 and 781 appear to have been civilians; 175 were children. In the period about which the CIA and Brennan made their claims, at least 45 civilians have been killed.


At the risk of stating the obvious, it might be worth comparing this to what would have happened if American citizens had been killed in the same way, and by doing so get a sense of how much a Pakistani life is worth these days.
If these had been American civilians killed, I think someone would have gone to jail for involuntary manslaughter at the very least, not to mention several people losing their jobs.
During the Vietnam War, it was quite obvious that the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians were not important to US government policy makers.
Now are we seeing the same thing with the new war?

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