Drones

The war on terror framework continues to savage the world’s poorest civilians.

We’ve been inculcated to view the world the way a 6-year-old watches cartoons: Bad Guys should be killed, and that’s the end of the story.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the U.S. has recently taken steps to transform a tiny, out-of-the-way outpost in the Djiboutian desert into a key hub for its secret drone war.

It shouldn't take the drone-killing of a U.S. citizen to cause a mainstream discussion of how reckless these killings are. But it does. That, by itself, should cause a serious examination of the mindset behind all of this.

The Intercept's inaugural exposé, by my colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, illuminates the deeply flawed interaction between omnipresent electronic surveillance and targeted drone killings –- two of the three new, highly disruptive instruments of national power that President Obama has pursued with unanticipated enthusiasm. <!--more-->

The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. <!--more-->