via Aletho News
EXCERPT:
Rachel Maddow defended the legally fuzzy bombardment of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia, and other nations in an interview with Howard Stern. In Maddow’s words the drones, “don’t change the politics of it [war] that much.” In reality, however, the politics have changed markedly because of the US military’s use of their stable/panoply of death-inducing/mass immolating drones. And it is, moreover, exceedingly unclear what is meant by Maddow’s comments as, for example, families have embarked upon lawsuits against the US government for innocents, non-terrorists, and non-combatants — who have been unceremoniously snuffed out — by the legally hazy, and decidedly unmanned aerial drones.
Additionally and infamously, of course, whole wedding parties have been wiped out, by some detached and far-flung controller in the American Southwest or in Langley, VA. Is this what is meant by making war more and more “hospitable” and “sanitized”? I guess, in a sense, but not; of course, for those at the receiving end of the drone. Such questions, I think, force one to wonder about what Maddow thinks regarding the Constitution — vis a vis the war authorization for the US military conflict — in the so-called Afpak war zone.
Indeed, the aforementioned authorization for the war in Afghanistan, pertains to the US military’s actions in Afghanistan — and Afghanistan alone. [4] Thus, of course, there is no constitutional basis for any sort of military, or even drone activities in the sovereign nation of Pakistan (or any of the other nations where they have been used). And furthermore, one wonders what Maddow’s position on the two American citizens — executed under unconstitutional bureaucratic fiat is — considering that this was not addressed in the Howard Stern interview. These Americans were, according to the Obama administration, guilty until proven innocent, but; of course, never received anything like their inalienable right to a trial, or the long-hallowed and (previously) integrally American jury of their peers.
International law scholar Richard Falk does believe that drones have changed the idea of war/military conflict seriously, and that their advent should be regarded with grave interest/concern. According to Falk the drones clearly raise questions about national sovereignty, and the parameters about presently held notions — of what are the currently permissible forms of war. Falk likens legal “rationalities” for the usage of the deathly — and indeed death-dealing — military drone technology, as analogous to John Yoo style torture memo-esque scrawlings of the George Bush Jr. administration/cabal. So, if some more mature, rational, and informed legal bases/doctrines, don’t arise regarding present and impending drone technology; Falk envisions a dystopian future scenario of rampant proliferation that will be imposed upon the world, by a small number of select, drone-armed, and exceedingly powerful elite states.
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