/unaccountable-killing-machines-the-true-cost-of-us-drones
Nick Turse referenced this article in a Tomdispatch interview and article. One point was the fact that there are private bounty hunters that actually get bounties for acquiring targets. No kill orders no bounty. Outside chain of command [private also gets charged to dept of labor, not defense], no transparency or review so no verification if targets were not women and children, just targets.
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Now imagine how many of these private contractors work in your cities, towns, and neighborhoods.
I read that article last night, doug, and yes, the part about targeting through mercenaries is disturbing. But certainly no less disturbing than these $3 million dollar missile equipped model airplanes the military has turned to as a way of making work for these well paid non military targeting agents.
I think this is a worthy topic for this World Affairs forum because it's an important extension of all those discussions we had during the Bush Administration years related to the U.S.'s big picture geopolitical objectives in the Pentagon's New Map as drawn by a Pentagon-related Strategic Planner, Thomas Barnett, a guy whose globalizing ideas you and I discussed a few times, back when Iraq was in full swing, which in typical Kafkaesque style he calls a "map for peace".
The deeper U.S. geopolitical issues remain intact now with Obama. One of the deepest and ultimately most disturbing elements in these issues to me is the objectification of human beings. Objectification, aside from being a much worshipped Ayn Rand philosophical tenet, is clearly related to the underlying market features of the neoliberalism involved in this globalization process. It's especially linked into the relationship to Empire which results in the peculiar attitude of those polyarchic representatives voted into office in this nation, and how they now tend to organize things in ways that ultimately discard our individual rights, which in essence, will be our humanity. The continued belief by our current "elected" Emperor about the dire need for this military blanketing of the planet brings me to this mornings read where Chris Hedges' latest article warns us of one of the most deeply alarming legislative strikes against our basic humanity signed into law by Obama:
Why I'm Suing Barak Obama by Chris Hedges
It may seem a stretch, but these issues are related.
Objectified human beings are capable of doing many things simply for money. Human beings who are truly part of communities behave differently.
Objectification makes human beings into machines -- economic machines or killing machines, the distinctions blur rather quickly.
A thoughtless economic policy IS a killing machine. There is no distinction. It's two ways of doing the same thing.
A thoughtless economic policy IS a killing machine. There is no distinction. It's two ways of doing the same thing.
"Thoughtless" is a difficult term when associated with what humans do. If one thinks of thought as a holistic process, and only a kind of rational logic is applied to produce a result, a "product" so to speak, then a kind of "thoughtlessness" may be argued to be involved in that process. I think we find this process occurring over and over in these human social constructions we call legislation, law.
The arguments against the kind of rational logical positivism that resulted from the so-called liberating liberal thought that invoked the industrial revolution and all the social changes that resulted, especially changes invoking rationally deduced individualism, involve that form of "thoughtlessness" as a kind of argument for all sorts of things. Rest assured the dedicated rationalists will vehemently disagree.
I think the result of that argument in modern societies has been two very divergent forms of thought, one leading to this extreme form of self centered individualism, where Ayn Rand's philosophy marks a sort of epitome of that thinking; and as a kind of ongoing force in response to that trend, one can find a tradition of humanism that makes an appeal for bringing about a humane social concern argument in the face of the ever revolving crises that have come about from what became an unnatural, commodification of human beings as a concept, now called, as if that's what it's always been, the "labor market".
I can think of two pieces of writing produced in 1944 that seem to epitomize those two forms of thought, and they, I believe, set the groundwork for this eternal debate going on today. The two thinkers who produced them are Karl Polanyi and F.A. Hayek. These are the titles:
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time [Paperback] Karl Polanyi
The Road to Serfdom: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition [Paperback] F. A. Hayek
I don't know if you came up with the handle "D_Natured" directly from that line of thought I just described, but I imagine somewhere in your process that concept has some relevance, though you may not have given it much direct thought. I hold we do not have to give things direct thought for them to be present in our process that create Mind, and that awareness on my part often brings about much argumentative disagreement with the rationalists, who tend to hold the god of ration and logic as a kind of authority above other human elements of mind.
When sound is no issue, anyone can pull the pin on a grenade and drop it into the barrel. The Muzzler is designed to enable silent disabling of large-bore guns during covert operations.
The Muzzler was designed to be able to reduce the usage of large guns, whether rifled or smoothbored. Once it is known that some barrels contain Muzzlers (and could kill or injure the operators themselves) – uncertainty and caution slows down deployment of them.
The Muzzler is a tube-shaped device that resembles an ammunition round of the target gun except its base has no flange and is stamped to resemble a closed breach (so that anyone hurriedly shining a light down the barrel could mistakenly report that the barrel is empty.
The top is made to look like a round fired in the target gun, but is made of any material harder than the metal used in the target gun (can you say depleted uranium?) and houses several pieces of rocker shaped DU which will mushroom outward in reaction to kinetic force applied from either attempting to push the Muzzler out from the breach-end of the gun or from the impact of a round fired into it.
The lower half of the Muzzler is comprised of a slotted cylinder within a slotted cylinder which the friction of being pushed into the gun barrel causes to open up. What is stored inside, which can then seep out, will not be divulged here except to say that some suggestions include a humanitarian aspect which calls for the inclusion of a material which will issue an aroma so that the operators of the gun have some forewarning that their weapon has been fouled and could harm them if fired.
The exterior of the Muzzler contains thousands of tiny hairs which will only allow it to be moved forward. For transport and storage Muzzlers are coated in a material which will dissolve under the friction of being deployed and in the presence of gun oil.
Once inserted, the Muzzler is almost impossible to remove – and rarely in a manner which will allow the big gun to resume operation.
Even those guns which accidentally or intentionally fire a round into a Muzzler without blowing up the gun barrel will be damaged to the point at which firing further rounds is unwise or pointless since the predictability of where the round will go is greatly diminished.
Cost of mass-produced Muzzlers - about $50. Cost of Tanks, etc. 10's of Millions each.
The Ace-High Doctrine (so named for Administrations that wouldn’t know a pair if they saw one) again showed itself when they caved to pressure from the War Profiteers making the big guns who felt their profits would drop if it became too easy to render their product less useful and declined to pursue development of the Muzzler.