Here's what he wrote in Rolling Stone (linked to Reader Supported News above).
Read an absolutely amazing article today. Entitled "Droning on about Drones," it was published in the online version of Dawn, Pakistan's oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper, and written by one Michael Kugelman, identified as the Senior Program Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
In this piece, the author's thesis is that all this fuss about America's drone policy is overdone and perhaps a little hysterical. Yes, he admits, there are some figures that suggest that as many as 900 civilians have been killed in drone strikes between 2004 and 2013. But, he notes, that only averages out to about 100 civilians a year. Apparently, we need to put that number in perspective:
Now let's consider some very different types of statistics.
In 2012, measles killed 210 children in Sindh. Karachiites staged numerous anti-drones protests last year, but I don't recall them holding any rallies to highlight a scourge that was twice as deadly for their province's kids than drone strikes were for Pakistani civilians.
Nor do I recall any mass action centered around unsafe water. More people in Karachi die each month from contaminated water than have been killed by India's army since 1947 . . . 630 Pakistani children die from water-borne illness every day (that's more than three times the total number of Pakistani children the BIJ believes have died from drone strikes since 2004).
So I'm reading this and thinking, he's not really going to go there, is he? But he does:
I am not minimising the civilian casualties from drone strikes. Nor am I denying that drones deserve rigorous debate in Pakistan (and beyond). Still, it's striking how so much less is said about afflictions that affect - and kill - so many more people than do drones.
The reason, of course, is the allure of anti-Americanism. It's easier - and more politically expedient - to rail en masse against Washington's policies than Pakistan-patented problems (I also acknowledge the deep concerns about drones that go beyond civilian casualties - like radicalization risks and psychological trauma).
So there it is, folks. Welcome to the honor of American citizenship. Should we replace E Pluribus Unum with We Don't Kill as Many Children as Measles? Of course people aren't mad about bombs being dropped on them from space without reason; they're mad because anti-Americanism is alluring!
OK, I printed this article and the referenced article "Droning on About Drones" and read them this morning. And I said, "Thank you Matt Taibbi-----Thank God for you!!!!" and laid a big kiss right on his photo.
Because he just keeps trying, ya know? He's a voice cutting through the craven, miserable, defeatist BS that poses are realism these days. And I just can't thank him enough for it. All around me are people who seem to not care enough to even mention any of this stuff that our taxes are paying for--ie, that we HELP MAKE HAPPEN.
"Because we're a peace-loving people, that's why!"
Why do I have to thank Matt Taibbi so much for just saying what I dearly wish I could hear people around me actually saying *out loud*? Or what I wish I could even figure out how to say myself??
Because I can hear him loud and clear, he jumps right off the page. And it makes me wonder why I am the only one in my immediate vicinity who's tearing my hair out over this stuff. I don't even know where to start anymore---with the people in my three dimensional world.
Oh, and ALSO he's bringing up Collateralmurder.com (though he didn't link to it).
That's what he's talking about here:
"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)."
Someone needs to talk about that bloody CollateralMurder.com apache helicopter video! Someone needs to talk about it NOW. The people who brought it to us are now sitting imprisoned in a jail in Ft. Meade and an office building in London. Journalism itself is on trial (and it's a secret Grand Jury in Virginia, and a military court that won't publish transcripts) and we Americans who fund this insanity are nodding, smiling, shrugging. They're F-ing shrugging and it just kills me. It kills me because it's personal to me----it involves someone I love being sucked into this world of brutal insanity that my tax dollars help fund.
And:
"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."
I've been saying this and saying this and no one is hearing me over here. Or, if they're hearing me, they're not acknowledging what I'm saying. The machines are really, really weirding me out now.
I want like hell to love the people around me...."love the ones you're with."
But they don't give a shit.
And so, in this time of marching ever-onward into deeper and deeper fascist silence, love is becoming something I feel toward people I've never met, will probably never meet, and who exist only as still images in my mind. And that is fucked up. That amounts to living in a world of delusion and imaginary friends. Or does it? I know these people are out there---the ones who care.
Image Source: WWW.swiss-miss.COM
I just desperately need to see more of them right in front of me... Somehow, some way. Maybe this driving need is what made "Occupy" happen. When there's nowhere to go to talk sense to people, the street is all you have left. Is that what this is?
I'm still hearing (in my head) the crazed cops on the Dorner case yelling, "Burn that M-Fing house down!"
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder