Sex and the single drone

[bemildred]

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Then, the crucial word at stake was "torture", and faced with it - and what top administration officials actually wanted done in the world - Justice Department lawyers quite literally reached for their dictionaries. In their infamous torture memos, they so pretzled, abused, and redefined the word "torture" that, by the time they were through, whether acts of torture even occurred was left to the torturer, to what had he had in mind when he was "interrogating" someone. ("If a defendant has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture.")

As a result, "torture" was essentially drummed out of the dictionary (except when committed by heinous evil doers in places like Iran) and "enhanced interrogation techniques" welcomed into our world. The George W Bush administration and the CIA then proceeded to fill the "black sites" they set up from Poland to Thailand and the torture chambers of chummy regimes like Mubarak's Egypt and Gaddafi's Libya with "terror suspects," and then tortured away with impunity.

Now, it seems, the Obama crowd is reaching for its dictionaries, which means that it's undoubtedly time to duck again. As befits a more intellectual crowd, we're no longer talking about relatively simple words like "torture" whose meaning everyone knows (or at least once knew). If "imminence" is now the standard for when robotic war is really war, don't you yearn for the good old days when the White House focused on "what the meaning of the word 'is' is," and all that was at stake was presidential sex, not presidential killing?

When legalisms take center stage in a situation like this, think of magicians. Their skill is to focus your attention on the space where nothing that matters is happening - the wrong hand, the wrong face, the wrong part of the stage - while they perform their "magic" elsewhere. Similarly, pay attention to the law right now and you're likely to miss the plot line of our world.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MJ01Df01.html

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[MADem]

2. Drones are a natural progression in the evolution of military power.

Robotics will play a greater role still in the militaries of the future.