Living with Death by Drone

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/05-2




Last week, Stanford University and New York University released a major study about the use of drones in the ever-evolving but never-ending war on terror. Unfortunately, many commentators missed the report's key message: Drones are terrorizing an entire civilian population.

I was one of the researchers for the study, and spent weeks in Pakistan interviewing more than 60 people from North Waziristan. Many were survivors of strikes. Others had lost loved ones and family members. All of them live under the constant threat of annihilation.

What my colleagues and I learned from these unnamed and unknown victims of America's drone warfare gave the report its title: "Living Under Drones."

People in the United States imagine that drones fly to a target, launch their deadly missiles with surgical precision and return to a U.S. base hundreds or thousands of miles away. But drones are a constant presence in the skies above the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, with as many as six hovering over villages at any one time. People hear them day and night. They are an inescapable presence, the looming specter of death from above.

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Thanks for posting this.

[marmar]

2. k/r ...... I don't know what's more shameful......

...... that it happens, or that Americans seem to be fine with it.

[msongs]

3. making enemies 24 hours a day. that's our foreign policy nt

[locks]

4. Friendly fire

Thanks for the post. I was a child when we destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We were taught that we needed to "show" the enemy what we could do if they didn't surrender and we, including the men who dropped the bombs, saw very little of the horrendous suffering our bombs had wrought on the Japanese. We didn't use the term "collateral damage" until Vietnam. Today we are even further removed from the suffering our bombs are causing; bombs cannot discriminate between the "enemy" and the "innocent."
People on all sides of the political spectrum need to understand this "war on terror" and stand against it.