Drone on the Range: Code Pink's Ann Wright Live from the Anti-Drone action at CREACH AFB

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Thu, 03/05/2015 - 10:00am to 10:15am
Interview with Ann Wright of Code Pink at CREACH protest

Here’s a summarized, paraphrased report that I got from TomDispatch today:
 
Are Pilots Deserting Washington's Remote-Control War?
A New Form of War May Be Producing a New Form of Mental Disturbance
By Pratap Chatterjee (http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/pratapchatterjee)
 
Drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.  And Code Pink’s appearance at the Nevada Command Center, CREACH, has got to be at least a little unnerving: it is as if their mums or older sisters showed up at their workplace to call them out as the murderers that they are.
But the kill lists keep gushing out of the White House, the leaks  have become gushing taps…This is all supposed to be secret, y’know.  If we just change the word “leaker’ to ‘whistleblower’ it would be a different scenario entirely.  We would be hearing more about The Espionage Act, ‘treason’, ‘terror’…
Relax, it’s just a little leak. in Washington’s ongoing “covert” drone wars in the Greater Middle East.
 
The administration’s top officials don’t hesitate to discuss or even brag about the program. In this, it follows in a tradition established in the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan in which “covert wars” -- in his case, in Central America -- were fought in remarkably open and publicity-conscious ways. Meanwhile, their supposedly secret nature kept them from serious oversight. In this way, covert and overt were wedded in a process intended to free the White House and the CIA to do as they wished.
 
As a result, in the post-9/11 years, at least in the mainstream media, drone assassination campaigns have generally gotten a remarkably free ride. While those “militants” always seem to go down for the count, it’s rarely mentioned in the same reports that, in places like Yemen, the local terror outfits that Washington means to crush from the air, militant by militant, terrorist leader by terrorist leader, only seem to grow.
 
More than a decade of intense experience with drones teaches us at least one salient lesson: our robot warriors make war in the usual sense of the term, but in another way as well. In places that are not officially American war zones, their operations also regularly generate war.  They are part of that problem. And let’s add a second lesson from these droning years into the mix. The U.S. has pioneered the drone as a weapon for a new kind of war. In the process, it has opened drone flyways down which many countries and undoubtedly terror organizations, too, will one day travel. The recent decision of the Obama administration to spread drone technology by selling armed drones to its allies will only hasten the process.
 
TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee, suggests today, a new and important critique of Washington’s drone wars is emerging from a thoroughly unexpected place: the drone pilots themselves. Explain it as you will, they are taking their hands off the joysticks and voting against drone war with their feet -- and possibly, though the subject couldn’t be murkier, their consciences.
 
 
The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.

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