Chilling Drone Deaths Reported Straight Up

Holder: Drone strikes have killed four Americans since 2009 - CNN.com:

The BO position is that he is against the death penalty for crimes, he would never "torture" anyone, but he will kill Americans and many others abroad with a drone strike when he sees fit.

It reminds me a lot of the old using a gun in home defense strategy -- "make sure they are dead".

This doesn't work so well in home defense of course, because it is very hard to guarantee kill shots, and "grace shots" are going to be discovered by CSI ... just watch. It is also true that very very few law abiding citizens are good liars. Leave that to to the professionals -- Politicians.

BO is going to fill in the details of his drone policy today, I'm sure the press will at a minimum report it as they did this article -- straight up. This is a good job of REPORTING as opposed to COMMENTARY -- this article doesn't tell you what to think. The administration uses drones to kill people abroad, including Americans -- that is their policy, nuff said in this case from the reporters POV.

If the press is willing to report that way, death is a nice clean thing. Unlike "torture". We all understand the definition of death, but "torture" is a label that is applied to something and we all get to visualize our worst searing horrible pain and obsess over how much we would hate it. Pain we all have some experience with ... death, not so much.

Of course death too can have meaning attached or detached through the magic of press commentary. During much of the time from 2004 on when there was no reason for us to be in Iraq or Afghanistan, the soliders dying there were suffering "meaningless deaths". Kerry even raised it in '04, "who was going to be the last man to die" -- the assertion being that death would CERTAINLY be a "meaningless death".

With the election of BO, that went away. The dead soldiers were "just dead", like folks killed in a car accident, or any of the other "standard ways to go" with little or no reporting. More soliders have died in Afghanistan under BO than died there under W. The loved ones of those soliders are left to find meaning in their life and death as they saw fit -- no longer an issue of national concern.

So why do I write about this??

Because I see an EXTREME danger in how far down the path of just letting an omnipresent MSM either tell us what to think, or not tell us to think at all, and for the majority of people to be just fine with that. The Sheeple are indeed sheeple.

My PERSONAL belief is that collecting terrorists and doing very strong interrogation on some of the high value targets (that some are certainly going to label "torture) is a worthy pursuit. I find the policy of not using any form of coercion any stronger than what we use in training for our own troops (eg. "waterboarding", used in SEAL training)  to be very defensible. Does "extreme rendition interrogation" work? I can't prove that it does, but I CAN absolutely guarantee you that we get ZERO information out of a terrorist killed in a drone attack ... nor from the "collateral damage", which is no longer discussed.

I'm fine with killing some terrorists in drone attacks. If they are AMERICANS and they are high value enough to warrant a drone attack though, then I think they are high value enough to warrant capture. I understand that the decision to not strongly interrogate them for fear of being labeled a "torturer", lowers their value and makes the risk of a capture raid seem too risky, but maybe that is good?? They are after all American Citizens, and at least in the past, that meant something.

Most of all though, what I find "chilling" is the near absolute willingness of the MSM to go with whatever BO says without question, and the near total acquiescence of the vast majority of the American people to be OK with that. EVERYTHING is "questionable", and the once-purpose of the "free press" was to question everything done by BOTH SIDES!

I find the assertion that killing people outright is somehow more "humane" than interrogating them with what some have called "torture" to be in the realm of the laughable -- but it is unimaginable that there isn't at least a national discussion on it.

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