Protest at Horsham Air Guard Base

27Apr2013

assembling
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 larger
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.

in front of base entrance
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.

from the front
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.

shouting
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.

signs
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
Wrapping up. I'll be providing notifications of future protests from http://www.prawnworks.net/ along with other anti-war news and views.