Drone Wars

     After about two years of Snowden's massive revealing of NSA documents, there appears to be a second Snowden emerging.

    Recently, The Intercept released classified documents about America's use of remote-controlled aerial vehicles, also known as drones, to kill people in foreign countries such as Afghanistan and Yemen. The documents that have been leaked can be found here, but I want to touch base on some of the issues that really surprised me.

    What was most shocking about the information was the fact that a vast majority of the targets killed through air strikes were not the intended targets at all. Our government was utilizing tools to kill foreign targets, but were killing others in the process. Also, the documents go into detail about how exactly the government chooses who will die on that day through a process of "baseball cards" where a profile is created for each of the targets with massive amounts of information that is used and monitored against them. It is outrageous to think that things have not changed since the Snowden leak. It seems as if the watching of people has only gotten worse, considering the lengths our government has taken it with listing, ranking, profiling and assigning death notices to massive amounts of people domestically and internationally.

    In "The Assassination Complex," Scahill discusses how there were efforts being made to advance drone technology and enhance surveillance and to avoid unnecessary killing by working towards capturing and interrogating civilians. However, there were many proponents of air drone strikes that went against this, showing how the military and our government will continue to take the easy way out of conflicts rather than solving them in a more civilized manner.

     But when does it stop? If it is so easy for the military to target civilians through an unmanned drone, when does it become an issue of excessively killing civilians whose lives could have been spared. They are becoming addicted and reliant on the simple techniques of drone wars and it should be up to the people of America to become educated on this issue and speak up.