Protest at Horsham Air Guard Base
27Apr2013
Assembling a few thousand feet down the road from the Air Base. This base
will be hosting drones as of October 2013, so we'll be making an appearance
on the first Saturday of each month until then. We started at 2:00pm today.
Crowd gets a bit larger. Here's the Facebook
Event Page for the protest. The US may have suffered a bit of blowback
from an overseas drone operation as the Tsarnaev brothers, the two men who
set off the Boston
Marathon bombs, may have been inspired and radicalized by the
long-range assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki.
Approaching the protest at the entrance to the base from behind. From ThinkProgress:
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s
Subcommittee on on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights met on
Tuesday for the
first
wholly open hearing on the Obama administration’s targeted killing
program, bringing forward a panel of witnesses skeptical of the program’s
current scope and guidelines.
Digby, after noting that President Obama's use of drones has
far outpaced G.W. Bush's use of same (Though Obama takes a far less
cowboy-ish stance, doing fewer "end-zone victory dances"), may well be
having a hubris problem:
That would be the point, I'm afraid. I think
Barbara Tuchman's observation in The Guns of August about how
untried technology leads to hubris is probably worth contemplating here.
This new weapon makes it very [much] easier to start wars but there's
nothing in the technology that will make it easier to end them.
The ethics of using drones are troubling,
to say the least.
Robotic warfare is just another step beyond
regular warfare. Or, a slippery slope, another cliche, a slope made
slippery by the blood of many innocents, "collateral damage," the coy
phrase the military industrial complex likes to use to trivialize these
deaths of innocents, that which is incidental to the main objective, death
and destruction ... of the so-called enemy.
Not that there's any question that Fox
News will support bombing "jihadists" under anything that appears to
be a justification.
There's quite a
bit of concern over the idea that drones may be used domestically, to
"offer unblinking eye-in-the-sky coverage" of all sorts of targets.
Wrapping up. I'll be providing notifications of future protests from http://www.prawnworks.net/
along with other anti-war news and views.