“A writer’s notebook is not a diary. Writers react. Writers need a place to record these reactions. That’s what a writer’s notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget. A writer’s notebook gives you a place to live like a writer.” - Ralph Fletcher
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
A counter-insurgency (or counter-terrorist) effort that is not democratically regulated with the sober influence of popular oversight will soon degenerate into human rights abuses and institutional tyranny.
Manny Jalonschi
(Source: politicususa.com)
If you’re not inside the National Security Complex, it may be just a tad hard to grasp how “due process” could mean a secret process of review in the White House presided over by a president with a “kill list” (whose legal justification, laid out by the Justice Department, cannot be made public). And yet that is, as far as we can tell, indeed the claim.
Tom Engelhardt
(Source: tomdispatch.com)
…a counter-insurgency (or counter-terrorist) effort that is not democratically regulated with the sober influence of popular oversight will soon degenerate into human rights abuses and institutional tyranny. For example, also noted in the New York Times piece is the remarkably low “civilian death toll” from our hundreds of drone strikes. Here a lack of democratic oversight led to a convenient, almost Orwellian, change of language that allowed the American public to imagine their drone program wasn’t massacring its way through civilians in central Asia.
Manny Jalonschi
(Source: politicususa.com)
—assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations. On that score, his power is total and completely unchecked. He can prescribe death for anyone “nominated,” choosing any of the “baseball cards” (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.
He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious “patterns of behavior” on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism that can stop him. An American global killing machine (quite literally so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us from.
Since 2004, between 2,464 and 3,145 people are reported to have been killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan, of whom up to 828 were civilians and 175 children. Some Pakistani estimates put the civilian death toll much higher.
Seumas Milne
(Source: todayonline.com)
Predators and Reapers are President Barack Obama’s weapons of choice and coercion, deployed only on the territory of troublesome US allies, such as Pakistan and Yemen—and the drone war is Mr Obama’s war.
Seumas Milne
(Source: todayonline.com)
