droning on. - dreadfully.

The Free Press seems to have become just another machine, another cog and just another bit of colour in the wheel  of  Western 'full spectrum dominance' .  

 The Secret Courts that are proposed will work to keep their conscience clear. See no evil. Hear no evil . Have no evil to report on . The pretence of being a free press in a free world can continue. Comfortably  unquestioned.    

It's been amazing, watching the histrionics and mental gymnastics some people have resorted to in their efforts to defend this infamous drone program. Extralegal murder is not an easy thing to manufacture consent around, and the signs of strain in the press have been pretty clear all around.

The drone-strike controversy briefly sizzled when it came out last week that even American citizens against whom the government does not have concrete evidence of terrorist complicity may be placed on the president's infamous "kill list."

The news that the executive branch had claimed for itself the power to assassinate Americans managed to very briefly raise the national eyebrow, but for the most part, the body politic barely flinched. I got the sense that most of the major press organizations sort of hoped the story would go away quietly (aided, hopefully, by the felicitous appearance of some distractingly thrilling pop-news/cable sensation, like Chris Dorner's Lost Weekend).

Meanwhile, it also recently came out that the New York Times, among other papers, sat on knowledge of the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia for over a year because, get this, the paper was concerned that it might result in the base being closed.

As old friend David Sirota noted, Times ombudsman Dean Baquet blazed a burning new trail in the history of craven journalistic surrender when he admitted the paper's rationale in an interview. "The Saudis might shut [the base] down because the citizenry would be very upset," Baquet said. "We have to balance that concern with reporting the news."

As if to right this wrong, the paper today ran an editorial, "A Court for Targeted Killings," which proposed that the government create a (probably secret) tribunal to which intelligence services would have to present evidence before drone-bombing a suspected enemy combatant.

The paper, which originally proposed the creation of such a court in 2010, suggested that the new court be modeled after the secret court created in the wake of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FISA court was designed to give a fig leaf of judicial review to secret wiretaps of suspected foreign agents without having to make the government's evidence public.

The Times editorial is a kind of moral lunacy that Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, captured in his play, We Bombed in New Haven, which was about an American Air Force commander instructing a squadron to bomb a series of ridiculous targets. There's a great scene where some of the men ask "Captain Starkey" why they've been asked to bomb Istanbul:

Starkey: Because we're a peace-loving people, that's why. And because we're a peace-loving people, we're going to bomb Constantinople right off the map!

Bailey: Why don't we just bomb the map?

What the Times proposes is the same sort of thinking. In their minds, the problem with our drone program isn't that we're murdering masses of people, it's that we're doing it without the appearance of legality. It looks bad on paper – so let's leave the problem, but fix the paper. Bomb the map, in other words.

This whole thing is crazy. In our own country, we don't allow the government to torture criminal suspects and/or kill people without trial – because it's wrong. If it's wrong here, it's wrong in Yemen or Iraq or Afghanistan; if it's wrong to do it to an American citizen, it's wrong to do it to a Pakistani. Our failure to recognize that and our increasingly desperate attempts to rationalize or legitimize this hideous program gives the entire world an automatic show of proof of American bigotry and stupidity.

It’s too easy to kill people when they’re just dots on a screen. It’s unpleasantly easier when you’re not even looking at the screen, but just giving an order to someone who is – like the officers in Iraq who told Apache pilots to light up a whole street full of civilians just because one of the pilots thought he saw a gun (it turned out to be camera equipment). And it’s even easier than that when you’re just a politician here at home, taking part by casting a vote in favor of this lunacy, or dreaming up justifications for it.

I’m not talking about physical bravery, I’m talking about bravery in the sense of being willing to stare directly at the consequences of your decisions, and we’re cowards because we do just the opposite, we work hard to avoid looking, and we build machines that help us do that avoiding.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/at-least-were-not-measles-rationalizing-drone-attacks-hits-new-low-20130214#ixzz2LCr2pkkO 
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