There is no excuse and certainly no honor, decency, or humanity to be found by turning mass murder into a video game.

I am haunted by this grieving Afghan father’s remark, “I took a piece of flesh with me home and I called it my son.”

those who voted for Obama, knew his positions:

1) that ‘all options were on the table’ against Iran, including a nuclear first strike.

2) he would ‘focus’ more lethal firepower on the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan

3) he would not withdraw from Iraq.

so most firepups voted for him anyway, and have to live with the cries of survivors on your conscience, all for what? a centrist Supreme Court Justice? was it worth it?

maybe, like Madelaine Allbright, Democrat Bill Clintons SoS, Democrats in good standing are able to think a half million innocent civilians is worth it, but great swathes of this country, left right and center, are getting mighty sick of the terrible human and financial costs of Obama’s continuations of Bush’s stupid wars.

Youth I talk to know the score – they do not differentiate much between the (D) and the (R) wings of the War Party, and they are right.

“Predators and other unmanned aircraft have just revolutionized our ability to provide a constant stare against our enemy,” said a senior military official. “The next sensors, mark my words, are going to be equally revolutionary.”

Unmanned MQ-9 Reaper aircraft now produce a single video feed as they fly continuously over surveillance routes, and the area they can cover largely depends on altitude. The new technology initially will increase the number of video feeds to 12 and eventually to 65.

Like the Reaper and its earlier counterpart, the Predator, the newest technology program has been given a fearsome name: the Gorgon Stare, named for the mythological creature whose gaze turns victims to stone.

Unmanned aircraft, used both for surveillance and for offensive strikes, are considered the most significant advance in military technology in a generation.

The Reaper flys at up to 250 mph, twice as high as its predecessor, the Predator, at up to 50,000 ft, which is twice as high as the Predator. It currently has 12 times as many video feeds but the will increase to 65 times as many within a year, at which point they expect to have 50 Reapers in the air at all times. Also:

Officials also plan to store weeks of video feeds on computer servers, so that analysts will be able to look back in time to follow the movements of people or vehicles.

“Using the all-seeing eye, you will find out who is important in a network, where they live, where they get their support from, where their friends are,” said the senior military official. “This gives you the option to arrest the individual, talk to the individuals or . . . wait till those people have gone down a lonely stretch of road and take them out with a Hellfire missile.”

The problem is that the people who design and control these gadgets seem to have no appreciation of the fact that drones are assassins’ weapons. These gadgeteers seem to have no understanding of the art and purposes of assassination.

Unless an assassination is intended to make an example of someone, it should be made to look like an accident or an unfortunate medical affliction, for example, these: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/21/204054/20/397/675926 Assassinating people with Hellfire missles and killing whole wedding parties in the process is Bush league amateurism.

I’ve gotten into some hefty arguments with my fellow Alaska progressives over this. They just don’t want to talk about it. Obama’s going to be here this coming week refueling on the way to Asia. Some Democrats might be meeting him, but nobody’s going to invite me to the show, even though I’m a party officer.

I’m writing a set of pieces for orchestra, called Afghanistan, which will premiere in Anchorage on May 14th. The 2nd movement is called Obama’s Reapers. The first movement is called Bamiyan Voids, and is about the destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2000. The other two movements are about simple life in Afghanistan and about Afghan women musicians.

It is a war crime not to take steps to ensure the safety of civilians. There have been too many mistakes to argue that this method reliably discerns the difference between soldiers (or insurgents) and citizens. This must stop.