The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.Someone please explain to me how America's ostensibly targeted drone warfare differs from Germany's W.W.II actions in lobbing rockets into London.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.
It seems, in every generation, at least one nation discovers some means of "hands‑free" or "no‑risk" remote warfare, some human rights nightmare that does not trouble the sleep of one or another self-satisfied national leader. And so the atrocities never end. Drones are America's contribution to this horrific idiom.
Just imagine if the Chinese began using drones... on Tibetans or Hawaiians.... because they were doing something the Chinese didn't like (like not buying their toxic products).
ReplyDeleteWhy do we get to break all sorts of international laws and bomb innocents (along with supposed terrorists)? Because um... 9/11!
They are building an acceptable momentum for droning border crossing illegal workers and families from Mexico.
ReplyDeleteellroon, I unhesitatingly predict that American exceptionalism will become America's downfall. It may have started with Bush 43, but Obama has his own obsessions in that department, and I don't even want to think about what Rmoney would do.
ReplyDeleteOh well. All good things...
karmanot - in some places, more than in Texas, people would be willing to do that right now; think of Sheriff Joe in Arizona. But you mustn't underestimate the ingenuity of border-crossing Mexicans. And some have discovered they don't even have to cross to make money: think of those guys with a catapult, tossing bales of grass over the fence...
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of Texas border to cover, and drones are expensive... $4m per aircraft (of the older, cheaper kind; the new ones are about $30m), and I don't know how much per mission, there are surely cheaper ways to stop undocumented workers. By and large, most Texans do NOT want to stop them, for a variety of valid reasons.