The Panopticon State - Where the government can see, it can send a drone. (Mark Steyn)

I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness...

My problem is that it becomes too easy to accept collateral damage.

Obviously there is a role for drones but I think we need more restraint. For instance, I could have accepted killing Bin Laden with a drone strike even if it killed his whole family because they were at least intimately connected to him. However I have more trouble with using a drone strike that targets the car we want...and kills everyone around it stuck in traffic.

However, I don’t recall these drone strikes being so widely used when Bush was still president. Obama seems to have really ramped up the drone strikes.

"...I would prefer killing at a distance rather than watching the light go out of someones eyes because I plunged a bayonet into their heart..."

~tet68

"It is well that war is so terrible–we would grow too fond of it!"

~Robert E. Lee

“...I would prefer killing at a distance..”

Flash back 45 years. How would bombing alone have worked in Vietnam? Would it have eradicated all the VC and NVN? The only way to eradicate the VC/NVN was to use a four-fold approach:

- Bombing
- Feet on the ground
- Pressure from local government
- Elimination of Democrats

Unfortunately, we never succeeded with the fourth approach but the other three were succeeding.

Killing from a distance is only a “piece” of a strategy.

Obama seems to have really ramped up the drone strikes.

Yes, because this is how the Democrats fight war. Think about Clinton. When fighting terrorists, or just distracting the press from his own legal problems, he would launch some tomahawk missles at Saddamm Hussien. Or the time he did the Serbian war entirely from bombing strikes, then claiming to be the first president to win a war entirely from the air, with no casualties. This is democrat war doctrine, they certainly don't mind war, but they are reluctant to admit it, so they do these things to pretend they are not in a war.

It is Obama that had gone farther than Bush in claiming the right to attack with no legal justification. It is also Obama that claims the right to declare war without congressional approval, something Bush never did.

"Do you remember the way it was before the war on terror? Back in the Nineties, everyone was worried about militias and survivalists, who lived in what were invariably described as “compounds,” and not in the Kennedys-at-Hyannisport sense. And every so often one of these compound-dwellers would find himself besieged by a great tide of federal alphabet soup, agents from the DEA, ATF, FBI, and maybe even RRB. There was a guy called Randy Weaver who lost his wife, son, and dog to the guns of federal agents, was charged and acquitted in the murder of a deputy marshal, and wound up getting a multi-million-dollar settlement from the Department of Justice. Before he zipped his lips on grounds of self-incrimination, the man who wounded Weaver and killed his wife, an FBI agent called Lon Horiuchi, testified that he opened fire because he thought the Weavers were about to fire on a surveillance helicopter. When you consider the resources brought to bear against a nobody like Randy Weaver for no rational purpose, is it really so “far-fetched” to foresee the Department of Justice deploying drones to the Ruby Ridges and Wacos of the 2020s?"

Who would have ever thought we'd be first hand witnesses to the downfall of our own society.

Or has it always been happening, and now it just seems to be advancing so rapidly ?

Either way, sad and frightening. I fear for my children, but I wonder, will they know any difference when they are older ?

My question to the the regime is, Are you going to use drones on a million protesters on the DC mall this time?

Rand Paul, are your here?

What if some of the protesters are armed?

I think these are legitimate questions. (though I never thought I would be asking them ).

Nobody ever comments.

I don’t recall that there were any M88 engineer vehicles at the Waco siege.

I do remember M88s at that outrageous attack on innocent Americans. I was assigned to two units that had them in 1971.

I just didn't remember that pic from Waco.

I entered M88 Waco at Google Images.

Travis' pic is at the top left. That flag should have been upside down.

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