Something that we don't read a lot about in our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is the war being waged by America in different parts of the world, by means of drones. This office worker war, where the perpetrators of the violence sit comfortable, miles away from the havoc and destruction that they dispatch on persons unknown, could be, and should be, categorised as war crimes. In war, the combatants are supposed to differentiate from legitimate combatant targets and civilians, drones fail miserably in this respect.
A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.This type of warfare is the preferred option, as it can be sold to the public easier than boots on the ground, with such illusionary labels as “clean” “surgical” and “accurate”, all lies, as the above information makes clear. It is not going to go away as America has seen a forty fold increase in its drone capacity
According to the GAO report, "From 2002 to 2010, the number of unmanned aerial systems in DOD's [Department of Defense] inventory has increased about forty fold, from about 170 to 7,500 aircraft." The CIA has over 80 Predator drones, while the Air Force has 468 Predators and the Army has 110, according to an October 2014 War Is Boring piece - based on General Atomics' (company that makes Predator drones) numbers - on drone fleet figures.Pakistan has suffered drone strikes on a vast scale which increased massively after Obama came to office. In that country since 2004, over 3,000 people have been killed by drones, with an estimated mere 2% being high ranking combatants and almost 200 were children. America is not at war with Pakistan, but attacks and kills the people of that country on a regular basis.
What other country regularly bombs another “friendly” country, and gets away with it, with no questions asked by the international community? The same is happening in Yemen and Somalia, attacks on other nations without any declaration of war. This is the new American imperialism, brutal and indiscriminate attacks around the world, all done from the comfort of an office thousands of miles from the death and destruction.
Of course the UK state is not innocent in this office worker warfare, as of 2013, the UK state has 500 drones.
