Laurie Calhoun's Blog, page 12
August 5, 2016
Evaluating “Humanitarian Interventions”: A Wake-up Call Podcast
Laurie Calhoun recently sat down with Adam Camac to discuss “Humanitarian Interventions”. In this 50-minute interview, the rhetoric is compared to the reality in cases such as the 2011 bombing of Libya and the 1999 bombing of Kosovo, both of which were vociferously supported by self-styled humanitarian hawks. Along the way, the failure of just […]
July 23, 2016
Exception or Precedent? The remote-control killing by police of a suspect on US soil
On July 8, 2016, a robot was used for the very first time to blow up a criminal suspect in the United States. Five Dallas city policemen had been slain, and several others injured. The perpetrator, Micah Xavier Johnson, was involved in a conversation with the police for a while, but when he began shooting […]
July 11, 2016
“We Murdered Some Folks”: How Self-Styled Drone Warrior US President Barack Obama Normalized War Crimes (Part 3)
I doubt that anyone would or could have predicted it a century ago, but today the US government has a generously funded program for hunting down and killing human beings. The program’s aim is not to stop aggressors in their tracks, to trap or apprehend them and thereby prevent them from causing harm to […]
July 9, 2016
We Reap What You Sow, Mr. President…
“Vicious, calculated, despicable”–that’s how Obama characterized the Dallas shooting. Those terms apply even more so to Obama’s own drone program, through which thousands of brown-skinned human beings have been summarily executed on suspicion of potential possible complicity in possible future terrorist attacks. Sad to say, but Obama’s primary legacy is to have normalized assassination and […]
July 5, 2016
Suspects versus Combatants: How Self-Styled Drone Warrior US President Barack Obama Normalized War Crimes (Part 2)
It’s official: the US government has now confessed to having intentionally and premeditatedly killed at least 2,372 persons in places where US force protection was not the reason for the acts of homicide. They also admit to having unintentionally killed at least another 64 persons who were doing nothing other than going about their lives […]
July 4, 2016
Do the Math: How Self-Styled Drone Warrior US President Barack Obama Normalized War Crimes (Part 1)
It’s hard to know where to start in addressing the US government’s “Summary of Information Regarding U.S. Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities,” released on Friday, July 1, 2016, before the long holiday weekend, in the apparent hope that no one would read it. Some of us did. The report claims, preposterously, that in […]
Do the Math: Part 1 of How Self-Styled Drone Warrior US President Barack Obama Normalized War Crimes
It’s hard to know where to start in addressing the US government’s “Summary of Information Regarding U.S. Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities,” released on Friday, July 1, 2016, before the long holiday weekend, in the apparent hope that no one would read it. Some of us did. The report claims, preposterously, that in […]
June 23, 2016
What’s Conspicuously Missing from the Big Bad Brexit Debate Drama?
My informal survey yesterday of a random sample of the good people of the village of Burnham, Buckinghamshire, and my short random exit poll survey this morning both revealed a strong outpouring of support for Brexit. None of the people with whom I spoke struck me as racists, and most did not even mention […]
June 21, 2016
We Kill Because We Can to be translated into Chinese…
Announcement: I am needless to say delighted that We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age will be translated into Chinese in an edition to appear in August 2017. Let the crosscultural, global debate on targeted killing and drone warfare begin!
June 18, 2016
The Selective Service-Drone Assassination Connection
Drone warriors have been redefining words from the very beginning, and they have sadly persuaded a fair portion of the populace to accept that the formerly taboo practice of assassination is now legal, provided only that it is labeled “targeted killing”. It’s supposed to be perfectly permissible for the US president (Obama) or UK prime […]
