Cross-posted from Asia Times
Lord knows, I should'a been gone
Lord knows, I should'a been gone
And I wouldn't've been here,
down on the killin' floor
- Howlin' Wolf, Killing Floor
As convenient as it is for someone in a cubicle in the Nevada desert to press a button and incinerate a Pashtun wedding party in North Waziristan, now, with only a click, anyone can download a 359 KB file available on Amazon for only $8.99 - including free wireless delivery -- and learn everything there is to learn about All Things Drone.
It's fitting that Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 has been put together by Tom Engelhardt -- editor, MC of the TomDispatch website and "a national treasure," in the correct appraisal of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole -- and TomDispatch's associate editor Nick Turse, author of the seminal 2008 study The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.
This is essentially Tom and Nick's revised and updated body of work detailing the uber-dystopian Dronescape over the past few years -- spanning everything from secret Drone Empire bases to offshore droning; a Philip Dick-style exercise on a more than plausible drone-on-drone war off East Africa in 2050; and a postscript inimitably titled, "America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill." It does beat fiction because it's all fact-based.
An MQ-1 Predator or an MQ-9 Reaper to go?
This digital file becomes even more crucial now that US and world public opinion knows US President Barack Obama is the certified Droner-in-Chief; the final judge, jury and digital Grand Inquisitor on which a suspicious Muslim (for the moment, at least, they are all Muslims) will get his paradise virgins via targeted assassination.
Obama owns his newspeak-drenched "kill list." He decides on a "personality strike" (a single suspect) or a "signature strike" (a group). "Nominations" are scrutinized by Obama and his associate producer, counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. The logic is straight from Kafka; anyone lurking around an alleged "terrorist" is a terrorist. The only way to know for sure is after he's dead.
And the winner of the Humanitarian Oscar for Best Targeted Assassination with No Collateral Damage goes to ... the Barack Obama White House death squad.
Targeted -- and dissolved -- throughout this grim process are also a pile of outdated concepts such as national sovereignty, set-in-stone principles of US and international law, and any category which, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, used to define what is war and what is peace. Anyway, those categories started to be dissolved for good already during the Bush administration -- which "legalized" widespread CIA and Special Ops torture sessions and death squads.
Any self-respecting jurist would have to draw the inevitable conclusion; the United States of America is now outside international law -- as rogue a state as they come, with The Drone Empire enshrined as the ultimate expression of shadow war.
Incinerate the faithful
Reading Terminator Planet inevitably evokes the incestuous interaction between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Even discounting the trademark wacky paranoia of Hollywood screenwriters and producers, a simple re-run of both the Robocop and Terminator series reveals this may end up badly.
And we're not even talking about a Revolt of the Drones -- yet. In 2010 there was already a hint of juicy possibilities to come, when a RQ-170 Sentinel crash-landed in Western Iran via sophisticated jamming, and was duly reverse-engineered, to the delight of Iranians, Russians and the Chinese. The Pentagon hysterically denied it had been out-maneuvered.
Lord knows, I should'a been gone
Lord knows, I should'a been gone
And I wouldn't've been here,
down on the killin' floor
As convenient as it is for someone in a cubicle in the Nevada desert to press a button and incinerate a Pashtun wedding party in North Waziristan, now, with only a click, anyone can download a 359 KB file available on Amazon for only $8.99 - including free wireless delivery -- and learn everything there is to learn about All Things Drone.
It's fitting that Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 has been put together by Tom Engelhardt -- editor, MC of the TomDispatch website and "a national treasure," in the correct appraisal of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole -- and TomDispatch's associate editor Nick Turse, author of the seminal 2008 study The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.
This is essentially Tom and Nick's revised and updated body of work detailing the uber-dystopian Dronescape over the past few years -- spanning everything from secret Drone Empire bases to offshore droning; a Philip Dick-style exercise on a more than plausible drone-on-drone war off East Africa in 2050; and a postscript inimitably titled, "America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill." It does beat fiction because it's all fact-based.
An MQ-1 Predator or an MQ-9 Reaper to go?
This digital file becomes even more crucial now that US and world public opinion knows US President Barack Obama is the certified Droner-in-Chief; the final judge, jury and digital Grand Inquisitor on which a suspicious Muslim (for the moment, at least, they are all Muslims) will get his paradise virgins via targeted assassination.
Obama owns his newspeak-drenched "kill list." He decides on a "personality strike" (a single suspect) or a "signature strike" (a group). "Nominations" are scrutinized by Obama and his associate producer, counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. The logic is straight from Kafka; anyone lurking around an alleged "terrorist" is a terrorist. The only way to know for sure is after he's dead.
And the winner of the Humanitarian Oscar for Best Targeted Assassination with No Collateral Damage goes to ... the Barack Obama White House death squad.
Targeted -- and dissolved -- throughout this grim process are also a pile of outdated concepts such as national sovereignty, set-in-stone principles of US and international law, and any category which, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, used to define what is war and what is peace. Anyway, those categories started to be dissolved for good already during the Bush administration -- which "legalized" widespread CIA and Special Ops torture sessions and death squads.
Any self-respecting jurist would have to draw the inevitable conclusion; the United States of America is now outside international law -- as rogue a state as they come, with The Drone Empire enshrined as the ultimate expression of shadow war.
Incinerate the faithful
Reading Terminator Planet inevitably evokes the incestuous interaction between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Even discounting the trademark wacky paranoia of Hollywood screenwriters and producers, a simple re-run of both the Robocop and Terminator series reveals this may end up badly.
And we're not even talking about a Revolt of the Drones -- yet. In 2010 there was already a hint of juicy possibilities to come, when a RQ-170 Sentinel crash-landed in Western Iran via sophisticated jamming, and was duly reverse-engineered, to the delight of Iranians, Russians and the Chinese. The Pentagon hysterically denied it had been out-maneuvered.
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