.
Update: My late colleague Nobel Laureate Ed Purcell, resigned from all government advisory positions when the Vietnam catastrophe came up.
He supported strongly my views and defined a terrorist as
"A person who has a bomb and no airplane to drop it from".
Killing another human being is, fortunately hard for another human being to do. Soldiers often get mental problems for having to kill another face to face. Pilots find it far easier:because they do not know who they are killing. Those who control the drones do so much too easily. The law in many states and countries follows this. We have the death penalty for a person to person killing. Soldiers get treated for post traumatic stress disorder, pilots get decorated.
I am not even sure what happens to those who control the drones!
(YOU MAY QUOTE ME)
Dick Wilson
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, Harvard University ( by email 21, April 2012)
.
"This headline and first paragraph from today’s Washington Post scoop by Greg Miller speaks volumes about so many things:
Even when it does not know then identities of those who could be killed.
There are many evils in the world, but extinguishing people’s lives with targeted, extra-judicial killings, when you don’t even know their names, based on “patterns” of behavior judged from thousands of miles away, definitely ranks high on the list. Although the Obama White House has not approved of this request from CIA Director David Petraeus, these so-called “signature strikes” that “allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior” are already robustly used in Pakistan — having been started by George Bush in 2008 and aggressively escalated by Barack Obama. There is much to say on this new report, but in order for me to focus on three discrete points, permit me to highly recommend two superb articles that highlight other vital aspects of this policy:
(1) this article from my Salon colleague Jefferson Morley this morning on why this form of drone-targeting is pure American Terrorism, and
(2) this essay from Chris Floyd about a recently published Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings on Obama’s love of drones and secret wars and how the military’s slang for drone victims — “bug splat” — reflects the sociopathic mindset that drive them".
America’s drone sickness, April 19, 2012
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