Calling US Drone Strikes 'Surgical' Is Orwellian Propaganda

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/27-7



***SNIP

It is a triumph of propaganda.

Its inaccuracy fully occurred to me as I played back a recent interview I conducted with Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institute. (His book Wired for War is a fascinating read.) "You used to measure a surgeon by how still could he hold his hand," Singer told me. "How precise could he make the cut? Well, robotic systems, it isn't a matter of shaking at minute levels. It doesn't shake. You are amazed by a surgeon doing a cut that is millimeters in precision. With robotics it is in nanometers." He was explaining why unmanned systems make sense in a variety of fields, not commenting on the Obama Administration's rhetoric in its ongoing, multi-country drone war.

But that is how we think of surgeons, isn't it?

They use a scalpel. Their cuts are precise down to the millimeter. Once in a great while there is a slip of the knife, a catastrophic mistake. In those cases, the surgeon is held accountable and the victim lavishly compensated. Oh, and there's one more thing about surgical procedures: while the person being cut into is occasionally victimized by a mistake, there is never a case where the scalpel is guided so imprecisely that it kills the dozen people standing around the operating table. For that reason, orderlies and family members don't cower in hospital halls terrified that a surgeon is going to arbitrarily kill them. And if he did, he'd be arrested for murder.

So no, drone strikes aren't like surgery at all.

"As much as the military has tried to make drone pilots feel as if they are sitting in a cockpit, they are still flying a plane from a screen with a narrow field of vision," The New York Times Magazine reports. "Then there is the fact that the movement shown on a drone pilot's video screen has over the years been seconds behind what the drone sees -- a delay caused by the time it takes to bounce a signal off a satellite in space. This problem, called 'latency,' has long bedeviled drone pilots, making it difficult to hit a moving target." That's one more way drones strikes are unlike surgery.

[The Magistrate]

1. True, Sir: Nothing Surgical About Several Hundred Pounds Of High Explosives

[msongs]

2. murder by another name, but it's ok if the USA does it nt

[Scootaloo]

3. Well, it makes sense, on a level.

It makes insides become outsides, after all.

[G_j]

4. All Orwell All The Time

such is the state we find ourselves in. Shall we call it a choice of the lesser of two Orwells?

[tama]

5. Real Orwell

was anarchist who fought in Spanish civil war against fascists and wrote good books against totalitarian tyranny.

[G_j]

6. true, correction:

my comment was meant to refer to "Big Brother" not George Orwell himself.