Barack Obama's Assault Drones

Our Mr. President Obama has launched himself into an attack on "assault rifles" owned by American citizens. We can't be allowed to have such weapons, the far-Left explains, because...well, just because. We might use them to kill kids, because some people who are mentally unstable enter "Gun-Free" zones and kill with abandon. Therefore, since we value human life here in the United States, we must keep these assault rifles out of the hands of American Citizens, or at least restrict ammunition and magazines.

I'm thinking we should look at Nobel Peace Prize-winning Mr. Obama, and take away his assault drones.

In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats

Barack Obama’s tears for the children of Newtown are in stark contrast to his silence over the children murdered by his drones …

If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed”. Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back”.

A two-man team in a New Mexico bunker, on orders from Mr. Barack (I got Bin Laden! And I have a Nobel Peace Prize!) Obama, a Hellfire missile is launched...

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

“These moments are like in slow motion,” he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.

“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied.

“Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

But the far-Left drones are only caring that Americans be stripped of their guns.

For the children.

---