TYT - Obama 'Really Good At Killing People'

Somebody's Grandmother, Somebody's Mother

Trey Smith

I offer the following two snippets without comment (because they speak for themselves).

An eight-year-old girl provided Amnesty International with the quote that leads its latest report on targeted killing in Pakistan's tribal regions. A drone strike killed the girl's 68-year-old grandmother as the old woman gathered vegetables last autumn. "I wasn't scared of drones before," the little girl said, "but now when they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?"

Her uncertainty is understandable. An elderly matriarch's death is inevitably tragic for her grandchild. Her survivors are made to bear an even greater burden when the death is cloaked in mystery. Was the strike a murder? A terrible mistake? Did the grandmother inadvertently do something to make the drone pilot suspicious? How can other innocents avoid her fate? The U.S. doesn't just refuse to explain its actions (or to compensate the families of innocent people it wrongfully kills). Our government cloaks the killings in extreme secrecy, refusing even to acknowledge its role. Of course little eight-year-old girls wonder if they're next. What would you think if a Hellfire missile arbitrarily blew up your grandma? I wonder if an eight-year-old girl is next too. It would make no more or less sense.
~ from 8-Year-Old Girl on Drones: 'When They Fly Overhead I Wonder, Will I Be Next?' by Conor Friedersdorf ~

The last time I saw my mother, Momina Bibi, was the evening before Eid al-Adha. She was preparing my children's clothing and showing them how to make sewaiyaan, a traditional sweet made of milk. She always used to say: the joy of Eid is the excitement it brings to the children.

Last year, she never had that experience. The next day, 24 October 2012, she was dead, killed by a US drone that rained fire down upon her as she tended her garden.

Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day. The media reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother's house. Several reported the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All reported that five militants were killed. Only one person was killed – a 67-year-old grandmother of nine.

My three children – 13-year-old Zubair, nine-year-old Nabila and five-year-old Asma – were playing nearby when their grandmother was killed. All of them were injured and rushed to hospitals. Were these children the "militants" the news reports spoke of? Or perhaps, it was my brother's children? They, too, were there. They are aged three, seven, 12, 14, 15 and 17 years old. The eldest four had just returned from a day at school, not long before the missile struck.

But the United States and its citizens probably do not know this. No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.

I care, though. And so does my family and my community. We want to understand why a 67-year-old grandmother posed a threat to one of the most powerful countries in the world. We want to understand how nine children, some playing in the field, some just returned from school, could possibly have threatened the safety of those living a continent and an ocean away.

Most importantly, we want to understand why President Obama, when asked whom drones are killing, says they are killing terrorists. My mother was not a terrorist. My children are not terrorists. Nobody in our family is a terrorist.
~ from Please Tell Me, Mr. President, Why a US Drone Assassinated My Mother by Rafiq ur Rehman ~

TYT - Civilian Deaths in Drone Strikes - Devastating Report

Left Unmentioned

Trey Smith

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama met in the Oval Office Friday with Malala Yousafzai, the Pakastani girl who was shot in the head on her school bus by Taliban gunmen for criticizing their rule, including banning education for girls.

The White House says the first couple invited Malala -- the youngest ever nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize -- to the White House "to thank her for her inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls education in Pakistan."

In a statement, the White House says the United States "joins with the Pakistani people and so many around the world to celebrate Malala’s courage and her determination to promote the right of all girls to attend school and realize their dreams."

In a statement released after the meeting, Malala said she was honored to meet with Obama, but that she told him she's worried about the effect of U.S. drone strikes. (The White House statement didn't mention that part.)

"I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," she said in the statement. "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."
~ from Malala Yousafzai Tells Obama Drones Are 'Fueling Terrorism' by Lesley Clark ~

Hmm. I wonder why the White House would fail to mention Malala's concern about drones? Maybe it is because it would prove to be quite embarrassing!

It's not the kind of message the Obama administration wants Americans to think about. No, talking about education is a more neutral topic and it certainly makes for a nice photo op.

RT - Drone Pilots Are Anti-Drone

How Could This Happen?

Trey Smith

A daring prison break earlier this week during which Pakistani Taliban insurgents freed about 250 of their colleagues was meant to convey that the group is a major threat to national security despite losing swaths of territory, havens and strategic conduits in the northwest tribal areas during military counterterrorist operations this year.

Al Qaida activists with knowledge of the details of the raid said the Dera Ismail Khan prison in northwest Pakistan, reputedly one of the most secure in the country, was one of several high-profile targets that militants from the Taliban, whose formal name is Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, had selected during a nationwide intelligence gathering operation between January and March.

The list was drawn up prior to a Taliban offer of peace talks extended to the right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party during campaigning before the May general election that the PML-N won, the activists said. The party’s leader, Nawaz Sharif, had said during his campaign that he would attempt to negotiate an end to the Taliban insurgency, which has cost Pakistan 48,000 lives and about $60 billion. But the Taliban feared that once Sharif was prime minister he would withdraw the offer under pressure from the military and the United States. The planned series of attacks was intended to apply pressure so that he would not, the activists said.
~ from Months of Planning Led to Pakistan Prison Break That Freed Scores of Terrorists by Tom Hussain ~

We have been told over and over again that the reason no significant changes should be made to the various NSA intelligence operations is that they are needed to thwart the activities of Al Qaida and yet a detailed plan put together over several months caught the US flat-footed. While I realize that no spying operation will have a perfect record, there have been several prison breaks conducted by Al Qaida over the past two weeks. If these intelligence programs are as effective as advertised, don't you think at least one prison break might have been stopped?

There is something else to consider as well. Here we had 200 well-armed freedom fighters or terrorists (it depends on a person's point of view) attacking a prison in Pakistan and yet no US drone strikes. This seems very odd to me. From numerous reports, drone operators tend to mount attacks often on flimsy suspicions -- people believed to be armed even when no weapons are seen -- and yet here we have a small army of men WITH guns and rocket launchers. Why didn't a drone try to take them out? If we can blow up people at a wedding, why can't we blow up people attacking a prison that holds "terrorists"?

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

Trey Smith

There is a big controversy over the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's picture on the cover of the most recent edition of Rolling Stone magazine. The majority opinion is that the photo glamorizes Tsarnaev and is thus in very poor taste.

In all honesty, that's not what I see at all. I see a young man -- plain and simple. Maybe the editors' intent was to glamorize him, but I suspect there was a different motivation: they sought to humanize him.

If he is found guilty of the allegations against him, then I think few will question that he committed monstrous acts, but that doesn't make him a monster. He is a human being. That's what I saw on the cover: a human face.

We humans have a penchant for denying the humanity of people who commit heinous acts. Though in most aspects of their lives, they really aren't that different than we are, we like to picture them as one-eyed ogres who drink human blood for breakfast. By turning them into goblins, werewolves, demons or monsters, we seek to separate them innately from the rest of us.

If Tsarnaev is guilty of the crimes he is accused of, I'd say the chances are very strong that he committed them as a way of expressing an ideology or worldview. It certainly is not an ideology or worldview that I share or condone, but it is not like he was born with a gene that predisposed him to want to kill innocent people.

In this same vein, I vehemently oppose Barack Obama's drone program which, though it's not proper to say in polite company, kills scores of innocent people. He does this because of yet another ideology and worldview that I neither share nor condone. But I don't view Barack Obama as a monster. He is a human being just like me. I believe he has ordered monstrous acts to be committed, but these actions do not rob him of his inherent humanity.

While I am still a bit shell-shocked that a Florida jury let George Zimmerman walk free for killing an unarmed teenager guilty of nothing more than walking down a street, I do not consider Zimmerman to be a monster. I do think he is a coward and a racist, but cowards and racists are people too.

While I would never use the word, monster, to describe a person, the people in my mind who at least might come close to that label are really messed up people like Jeffrey Dahmer or sociopaths like Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway and Richard Ramirez.  These individuals killed simply for the fun or thrill of it, which one might say is truly monstrous!

TYT - Will We EVER End The War On Terror?

TYT - Obama Brags About Out of Control Drone Strategy

It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's a Drone?

Trey Smith

In a Massachusetts town where no one has ever died in a drone strike and no one is likely to for the foreseeable future, it is nevertheless unnerving to hear an unidentified aircraft buzzing overhead.

Just ask the residents.

The mysterious plane that's flying over Quincy on starlit nights is frightening some of them, the local CBS affiliate reports. "It's not the state or local police doing the flying, and the FAA is giving out little information, even to city officials," reporter Bill Shield states in the writeup. He goes on to cite sources who indicated "that the aircraft is not a drone, that it is manned. FAA spokesman Jim Peters would only say, 'We have to be very careful this time' concerning information."

One resident described it as "this strong humming sound" that gets louder and fainter as the plane flies to and fro in the middle of the night. Local leaders are getting inundated with phone calls, some from people complaining that they can't sleep, but haven't been given any information.
~ from A Buzzing Sound in the Massachusetts Sky Evokes Drone Fears by Conor Friedersdorf ~

As a general rule, when a government official refuses to divulge information EXCEPT in the form of a specific denial, you should expect that whatever they tell you is patently untrue is, of course, true. In this specific instance, about the ONLY thing local residents have been told is that the aircraft is not a drone, so it most likely is!

However, in this specific case, it doesn't really matter if it is a drone or it isn't. Why? Because the day is coming -- if it is not already here -- that drones flying over America's towns, cities and countryside will be a common happenstance. My guess is that there may be so many domestic drones in our skies that it won't be uncommon for them to crash into each other! There will be FBI and CIA drones. There may be some from Homeland Security. The state police will employ a few as will county and local police departments. Maybe Corporate America and the mainstream media will get into the act too!

It will be at the point that domestic drones are so commonplace when we will see how Americans REALLY feel about drones. As long as they buzz solely over the heads of Muslims in faraway places, most Americans don't give drones a second thought. But will they show the same degree of disinterest when drones are buzzing above their own heads?

What do you think?  (You only get one guess.)

Drones as a Tool for the Patriot Act

Trey Smith

In my post from this morning, Cause and Effect, I discussed a column by David Sirota which points to the fact that there is a "cause and effect" implicit with drone warfare. On further contemplation, it dawned on me that our use of drones has another intended consequence that may not be readily apparent to most Americans: It provides our own leaders with the justification to curtail our freedoms and liberties to a severe extent.

The use of drones to murder faraway others creates blowback. While our leaders feign innocence in this knowledge, you can be damn sure they genuinely understand it. Since retaliation these days comes in unconventional forms -- like exploding bombs during a crowded athletic event -- no place in America can now be deemed "safe". Since retaliatory attacks will come in different forms at different times, it provides our leaders with the needed pretense to eviscerate what is left of the US Constitution!

Since it is hard to tell who the "enemies" are, our government must now treat every one of us as a potential threat. In their view, potential threats to public safety don't need or warrant constitutional protections. And so, ALL Americans -- accept for the wealthy elite, of course -- are now viewed as possible enemy combatants.

You see, the current administration is utilizing drones with a "killing two birds at once" approach. Not only can they keep to the schedule of perpetual war by creating far more enemies than they ever can possibly kill or maim, but by doing so, they create the atmosphere by which to protect us from the enemies they are creating by turning our nation into a police state since any one of us might be one of those enemies! All the while, they are robbing us blind.

You see, even if you happen to be a callous SOB who doesn't give a diddly squat about the lives of innocent people in faraway lands, you should still oppose the rise in our use of drone warfare out of your own self-interest. Those drones are being utilized as the unstated justification to take away YOUR rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Cause and Effect

Trey Smith

Throughout history, the one proven check on the unbridled militarism has not been Congress, the Constitution, foreign casualties or unsustainable Pentagon budgets; it has been the perception of life-and-death risk to the wider citizenry. When conscription ended in 1973, that perceived risk for most Americans was reduced and, not coincidentally, we’ve seen our government feel freer to engage in longer and more risky military adventures than ever, and without fear of widespread opposition.

Now with drone warfare, the same government perceives that violence comes with even less immediate life-and-death risk for our country, and consequently our technologized violence is expanding. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government feels so uninhibited that it has moved beyond targeted killing to “drone attacks based on patterns of activity” — attacks aimed at locations without actually “know(ing) the identity of the targets.” Among the general population, it’s much the same dynamic: With drones seeming to make war less risky, there hasn’t just been little opposition to the drone war; polls actually show strong support for continuing the robot onslaught, even as we learn about its deplorable civilian casualties.

But in those casualties exist the pernicious lie of drone technology, the lie that suggests drone warfare is ultimately a consequence-free endeavor for the drone-wielding nation.
~ from How Drones Deceive Us by David Sirota ~

As I have written before, drone warfare is an out of sight/out of mind endeavor. Because Americans don't see or experience it, drones provide a false sense of sanitized war. But as David Sirota points out, cause and effect don't go bye bye with the use of drones. Instead, drones create blowback that tends to manifest itself in ways we have trouble dealing with.

For all the horror of the Boston Marathon bombings, we should expect to suffer a lot more attacks of this nature. When one side holds a vast superiority of power, the other side must resort to guerrilla warfare. This is a lesson that Americans should understand well because this was how the colonists often attacked British troops during the American Revolution!

As Sirota continues,

With mounting evidence that America’s massacre of foreign civilians is creating more terrorists than it is neutralizing, and with terrorists citing our drone operations as motivations for their plots against us, there are consequences; they are just different than what we’re accustomed to. They aren’t, say, traditional counter-volleys on a declared battlefield. Instead, they are more like the Boston bombing, aka asymmetrical terrorist attacks against nearly impossible-to-protect soft targets.

Violence -- whether committed by individuals OR nations -- breeds more violence. The annals of human history serves as a testament to this assertion. The more we kill with drones, the more animus we will find mounted against us. That animus eventually will play out in ways that we can hardly fathom.

Whoop-De-Doo

Trey Smith

Thursday's landmark decision by the Pakistani high court in Peshawar is a remarkable document: Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan examines the US use of drones against Pakistan's tribal areas and reaches several conclusions that, while obvious to most sensible observers, seem to have eluded American authorities for several years.

The case was filed last year by Shahzad Akbar, of the Foundation for Fundamental Rights (FFR), a legal charity based in Islamabad. The case was brought by families of victims killed in a US drone strike on 17 March 2011. The strike – one of more than 300 Obama has launched at Pakistan – is infamous: more than 50 people were killed, including many community elders who had gathered to settle a local dispute over a chromite mine. For the locals it was the equivalent of a strike on the high court itself.

The chief justice's first finding is perhaps the most obvious: "[Drone strikes] are absolutely illegal and a blatant violation of sovereignty of the state of Pakistan." The strikes are, he says, international war crimes, given that there is no state of war between the US and its nominal ally, Pakistan.
~ from Will Pakistan Finally Stand Up Against Illegal US Drone Attacks? by Clive Stafford Smith ~

Now that the Chief Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court has rendered this decision, what difference does it make? It is more than obvious that the Obama administration doesn't give a diddly what Pakistan or any other nation thinks. Heck, the Obama administration doesn't even abide by OUR constitution, so why would they abide by international law!

Does anyone think that this court decision will stop drone attacks? Do you think that even UN condemnation would impact this strategy in the slightest? For the longest time, the US has been a rogue state. Our elected leaders -- from BOTH political parties -- talk about the importance of international agreements, but only in terms of how other nations must follow them. If international law butts head with something we (or the Israelis) desire to do, we simply thumb our nose at them.

I mean, really. Who would try to put us in our place? Who would go toe-to-toe with the best-funded military in the world? Who would want to risk economic annihilation?

Sadly, we are the big ugly bully on the block! We only abide by the rules we want to abide by. The rest? Don't make me laugh cry.

If It Moves, Shoot It

Trey Smith

Can anyone read the McClatchy Newspapers summary of top-secret intelligence reports and continue to deny it? Set aside the morality and effectiveness of the CIA's targeted-killing program. Isn't it important for Congress and the people to know the truth about the War on Terrorism? Many Americans remain furious that the Bush Administration gave Iraq War speeches that elided inconvenient truths and implied facts that turned out to be fictions. Is the objection merely that the Iraq War turned out badly? Or is misleading Congress and the public itself problematic, especially when the subject is as serious as killing people in foreign countries?

To justify frequent drone strikes that regularly kill innocent people, risk serving as a terrorist recruiting tool, and terrorize whole communities understandably averse to drones buzzing above their homes, Obama Administration officials give the impression that al-Qaeda terrorists are the main targets. As it turns out, they haven't just helped hide the fact that the Bush Administration kicked off America's drone campaign in Pakistan by killing someone at the request of Pakistan's government -- as Jonathan S. Landay explains, Obama officials have misled us about their own behavior. "Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified 'other' militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show," he reports.

The misleading rhetoric includes words spoken by President Obama himself:

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA's missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against "specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces" involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting "imminent" violent attacks on Americans. "It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative," President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. "It has to be a situation in which we can't capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States." Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn't adhere to those standards.

In fact, the documents "show that drone operators weren't always certain who they were killing." Under what legal theory does the Obama Administration justify that behavior? It won't tell us.
~ from New Evidence That Team Obama Misled Us About the Drone War by Conor Friedersdorf ~

I don't know about you, but this revelation doesn't shock me at all. As soon as I learned that Team Obama defined a "terrorist" as ANY male above a certain age, it became apparent that our drones fire on people randomly. You don't craft such a broad and nebulous definition if you genuinely are targeting specific individuals.

It reminds me of hunters who accidentally shoot other people, domestic animals or cows. They tromp out into the woods all ginned up for a trophy kill and, with their adrenalin pumping like mad, they look for something to shoot. Without actually eyeballing and scrutinizing a specific target, they fire at the first thing that moves. Afterward, they fall all over themselves trying to explain how they somehow mistook a 5 foot tall woman for a deer or a golden retriever for a bear! In too many of these cases, I bet the sad truth is that they had no idea what they fired at. Something moved, so they pulled the trigger.

When people chastise me for refusing to vote for the supposed lesser evil -- in the last two presidential elections, that has been Barack Obama -- I wonder how these same people can look themselves in the mirror! By supporting Obama, you are supporting the trivialization of lives in faraway places. You are saying that, while it may make you a bit squeamish, you support a hunter who shoots blindly. You are okay with a hunter who shoots random people as long as he tells you that he was convinced that these folks were deer or bears.

Not me. I don't abide by that. Not. One. Bit.

TYT - Don't Stand With Rand

An Objective Definition of the "T" Word Is Murky

Trey Smith

As a follow-up to my post earlier this evening, here's Cenk Ugyur of The Young Turks talking about the nebulous word, terrorism.

Boeing Boings

Trey Smith

It is getting harder and harder to figure out what the Democratic and Republican Parties stand for these days. In the old days, the GOP was the party of business and the Democrats stood up for the rest of us. But it is difficult to say that now when a Democratic president seems intent on placing Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, attacks government whistleblowers relentlessly, maintains a "kill list" of foreigners AND Americans, and appears set to approve the greatest environmental boondoggle yet (Keystone Pipeline).

It is not just on the federal level that the party lines are being blurred. Here in Washington, it was Republican lawmakers who proposed a bill to regulate domestic drone use. They got a few Democrats to go along with them, but then our one of our state's economic kingpins got into the fray and that was the end of that!

“We believe that as the technology matures, best practices and new understanding will emerge, and that it would be counterproductive to rush into regulating a burgeoning industry,” Boeing spokeswoman Sue Bradley wrote in a statement. (The company makes a variety of drones from the Unmanned Little Bird and the A160 Hummingbird helicopters to the ScanEagle which has been used in Iran and Iraq and the proposed new X-45C combat aircraft.)

After the company approached several lawmakers, Frank Chopp, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington state, canceled a scheduled March 13 vote on the bill. Instead Jeff Morris, another Democrat who chairs the House Technology and Economic Development Committee, was asked to lead a “more comprehensive study of surveillance issues.”

Yes, it was the Democrats who killed the bill! They sided with Boeing in putting profits before people.

And this is the supposed liberal party?

Droning On

Trey Smith

As quite a few commentators have pointed out, one of the chief problems with current American foreign policy is less about the utilization of drones than America's penchant for killing indiscriminately. Drones are but one means of accomplishing this. And yet, the drone program has served as the fulcrum of criticism. I think this is the case because drones represent a cowardly way of doing the dirty deed.

Drones operate much the same way as long-range missiles. It allows a nation to rain down terror on others, while not exposing your own troops or civilian population to much danger. Drones take this a step further because the other side often doesn't have the faintest idea where the computer operators are housed. They could be almost anywhere.

In the old days, if you wanted to punish or attack others aggressively, you had to be in close proximity. By being so near by, your troops were exposed to the real possibility of retaliation. While the other side might experience the greatest number of casualties, your side took its lumps as well. So, attacks of this nature were based on cold calculations: How many casualties on our side can we accept in order to brutalize the other?

Drones have obliterated this calculation. Now you can brutalize the other side without worrying much at all about near-term reprisals. You can kill and maim others willy-nilly and, once a mission is completed, the attackers get to go home to drink martinis and lounge in the sun. In a manner of speaking, it is like shooting fish in a barrel or those hunters who go to wildlife parks to shoot drugged animals contained by fences.

A Nation of Porno Fiends

Trey Smith

The pornography of America's global killing spree is intolerable, and, by the by, I am sick of hearing about drones. A child killed by a Hellfire missile that was fired from a drone is exactly, precisely as dead as a child killed by a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, precisely as dead as a child killed by a smart bomb, precisely as dead as a child killed by a sniper, precisely as dead as a child killed by a land mine, or by a cruise missile, or by any of the myriad other ways instant death is dealt by this hyper-weaponized nation of ours.

Exactly, precisely as God damned dead, and the blood is on our hands regardless of the means used to do the killing. The issue is not the drones. The issue is our hard, black hearts, and the grim fact that the debate in this country right now is not about whether the killing is wrong, but about the most morally acceptable way of going about that killing. Drones are bad, but snipers are better, because you don't hear the buzzing sound in the sky before your lights go out forever. Or something.
~ from Waking From My Moral Coma by William Rivers Pitt ~

I'm encouraged that SOMEONE ELSE recognizes this problem. As readers should know, this is an issue I have been harping on for some time. America has become a killing machine with no conscience and, as citizens of this country, the blood is on all of our hands.

A lot of the blame should be placed at the feet of our leaders. They are the ones in the position to call the shots. They are the ones who often make arbitrary decisions about who will die to further US hegemony and corporate interests.

But that doesn't absolve the American public from blame. For one thing, we put these yahoos in office. We elect them. We give them free rein. Even worse, if opinion polls are to be believed, we cheer them on. We applaud when they rain down death on the guilty and the innocent alike. And we rarely bat an eyelash.

I find it so ironic that this predominantly Christian nation -- one that worships the ultimate figure of peace -- is so bloodthirsty and vengeful. Preachers and ministers rail from their pulpits and in public media about the supreme importance of morality in our personal lives and yet, at the same time, acquiesce to abject immorality in our collective lives as a society. They will scream that killing an unborn child is the epitome of evil and yet they have no qualms about our slaughtering of born children who, through no fault of their own, live in countries that we don't happen to like at any given moment.

Killing for the sake of killing is wrong. Killing to advance a political agenda is heinous. It doesn't matter who is doing the killing and it doesn't matter who is doing the dying. It is still as wrong as wrong can be. If we sit by and allow it to occur without protesting it, then we, as a nation, are truly morally bankrupt.

Lining Up Some Guinea Pigs

Trey Smith

Everyday I scan the headlines on a variety of news sites. Here's one that caught my eye yesterday: FAA Seeks Proposals to Create Six US Drone Test Sites. These test sites will be to assess "how best to safely integrate the unmanned aircarft into the national airspace."

If you didn't catch the drift, let me spell it out for you. We're not talking about testing drones for use in foreign theaters; we're talking about the widespread use of drones domestically. If the federal government is set to spend a lot of taxpayer dollars on these projects, then you must know that drones will soon become an everyday part of life. Wherever you or I go, there will be a drone overhead to track our every movement.

In the short-term, the people I feel most sorry for are the residents in the areas of the chosen six test sites. You folks will be the front line Guinea Pigs in this national experiment. You will be the first ones to have your privacy invaded. You will be the first ones to have Big Brother watching you over the shoulder. And you will be the first ones to suffer when the contractors go over the proverbial line.

But be rest assured that the violation of your basic civil rights will serve as a blueprint for the violation of everyone's basic civil rights. So, I guess we could say that you will be trailblazers into the rush toward the new frontier -- the frontier in which basic civil rights no longer exist!