“The Specter of Domestic Drones” @ Antiwar.com

Posted on July 2, 2012

Simone Richmond — July 2, 2012: “In recent months, the U.S. policy of drone attacks to kill suspected militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen has come under heated criticism. The extrajudicial targeted killings of suspects, including American citizens, is in itself a stark violation of international law. Add to that the fact that President Obama has ordered hundreds of strikes (over five times as many so far as did his predecessor Bush) and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians (now over a thousand by the most conservative estimates), with drones’ missiles inevitably raining down on funeral gatherings and mosques; the posthumous classification of all military-age male casualties as “militants” for the purposes of PR; and the creepy image of Obama fretting over the biography of each suspect on his “kill list.”

With their courageous acts of civil disobedience at the Air Force and Air National Guard bases that control the drone strikes, Code Pink and other activist groups are sounding the clarion call that these remote-controlled killers commit war crimes. But amid the growing recognition of the brutal effects of armed drones abroad, it’s also time for activists to take a hard look at the brave new world of surveillance drones being used here in the United States…………………………”

Read more at Antiwar.com.