Jane Mayer: The Risks Of A Remote-Controlled War … my personal sense is you can’t really go around the globe killing people as the United States government without igniting some kind of retaliation. I think you—once you start killing people on the other side of the world, you are going to, first of all, kill some of the wrong people, which this program has done.

Oh, that. Pish tosh. Nada. Our nada who art in nada.

I’ve written about drones before. They seem to be the ultimate Viet Nam, technology as means to involve us in perpetual—not war. Killing. Picking out someone halfway around the globe and killing him. I suppose this just makes naked the point of troops-on-the-ground war. But when will we learn to keep our bloody hands to ourselves?

… the legal change was we said terrorists are no longer criminals. They are combatants in a worldwide war and so killing them is part of warfare.

Gotta love those legal minds. John Yoo still teaches at UC Berkeley. Hey, his hands are clean.

… in fact the CIA … they have had a tremendous run of killing important al-Qaida figures. They say that more than half of the top 20 people that they’ve wanted to get a hold of they have now killed through using this program, mostly in the last year, really. So they’ve been knocking them off one by one and they feel pretty good about it for, you know, good reasons.

Why do I think we could kill Bin Laden himself and absolutely nothing would change.

… the military has now added 50 Afghan drug lords to the list of people who they can target … So what began as a kind of a small exceptional program of using the most lethal force against the worst enemies that the United States has … has now kind of dribbled out and it’s becoming a bigger, fuzzier group … And of course as that group grows larger, it raises more and more questions about whether this is really necessary. Is this really proportional?

Of course not. The bigger question, a la Viet Nam, is, Does escalation ever get cut back? Like, does that ever happen? Or do we just get in deeper and deeper, leaving scars upon the moral body of the nation that never heal.

… the problem is, of course, that the drones take out a number of innocent people or just make mistakes sometimes and you wind up killing, you know, the wrong people.

Like, you know.

… one of the weirdest things … that’s actually being developed right now is something called Nano-drones which are—they’re basically like little killer bees that can follow their prey, even going in through an open window. And they are about two and half inches long and they are being developed. And there are actually also drones that they’re developing that are kind of aerial tankers that are going to allow these drones to refuel without ever landing. So, there’s going to be sort of perpetual drone operations up in the air around the world … My sense is that this kind of technology, there’s going to be no turning back.

Nano Nam. Horrible and endless and truly, a world I cannot imagine and deeply wish I didn’t have to.

Tags: al-Qaeda, bin laden, drones, john yoo

§ One Response to “Our Al Qaeda Who Art In Nada”

• jaye says:

  1 December 2009 at 4:02 AM

  The fact that John Yoo is still at Berkley bothers me as it makes me think less of Berkley. Perhaps he is there to bring some sort of strange energy to a place known for interesting energy.

  He is just an example that a person can be so much less than their resume.

  Found you from Writhe Safely. Love your blog, too.