After years of mismanagement, the Tribune Company newspapers -- including the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times -- are up for sale.  And one of the potential buyers? The Koch brothers.  And wow are people outraged!

Our elected and unelected officials tell us that drone strikes target top level enemies of the United States who are imminent threats to us, and that killing innocent people is avoided altogether or minimized. 

Congressional hearings, with a couple of excellent exceptions, question outside academics about the legality of this purported strategy.  The Obama administration declines to send any witnesses.

But drone pilots have begun talking to the media.  And they describe policies that bear a lot closer resemblance to reporting from the areas where the missiles strike.  These pilots should be brought before Congress.

Here is a stunning new interview with one of them:

"So the pilot is not only flying the airplane, he or she is using all those sensors to watch a potential target, circling over it for hours or days at a time. What can you really see?

"Okay, so in a village in, say, country X, where the houses are built together, there are adults who live in this house, and these children belong to those adults because we see them out in the fields together or we see them eating dinner. So you can start figuring out who is associated with who. Who is a stranger, who is it that's visiting this house? There's a dog and it barks at strangers, so if we needed to go in and free a hostage or conduct a raid, you'd want to tell the land forces there's a dog there and either it's an attack dog or it alerts the village that somebody's coming.

"You must develop an emotional tie with the people on the ground that makes it hard if there is going to be a strike or a raid, people are going to be killed.

"I would couch it not in terms of an emotional connection, but a … seriousness. I have watched this individual, and regardless of how many children he has, no matter how close his wife is, no matter what they do, that individual fired at Americans or coalition forces, or planted an IED -- did something that met the rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict, and I am tasked to strike that individual.  The seriousness of it is that I am going to do this and it will affect his family. But that individual is the one that brought it on himself. He became a combatant the minute he took up arms."

This pilot, in fact this director of the Air Force Remotely Piloted Aircraft Capabilities Division, has not said that a high level operation leader of terrorists who is imminently threatening the United States is targeted.  He has said that some ordinary guy who has chosen to violently resist the hostile foreign occupation of his country by shooting at the occupiers is targeted.

He has also not said anything to satisfy those who support the notion of just wars but want them conducted in compliance with the Geneva Conventions and other such legally binding limitations.  This director of a U.S. drone kill program openly says that our public employees target a family for death if needed in order to blow up a foreign soldier from thousands of miles away.  Every effort is made to avoid killing innocent family members, he says in the interview, but if it can't be avoided, well, the target "brought it on himself."

Here another pilot describes specific such incidents.  Here the New York Times reports on the resulting PTSD suffered by drone pilots.

War is murder, and this type of war ought to look to most people like the murder that it is.  But even if you accept war, this is not how ANYBODY claims it is to be legally done.  This is beyond what Congressional witnesses or even Congress members would say is acceptable or legal.  Yet this pilot blurts it out to the media with apparently no concern that his life will be inconvenienced by further questioning.

Enough is enough is enough. End this madness now.

https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-arun-gupta

Arun Gupta, whose writings can be found at occupyusatoday.com, discusses the lives of refugees from the U.S. war on Iraq now living in California, and the crimes of David Petraeus who has now been made a professor by the City University of New York and the University of Southern California.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code from Archive or  AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.

Syndicated by Pacifica Network.

Please encourage your local radio stations to carry this program every week!

Past Talk Nation Radio shows are all available free and complete at
http://davidswanson.org/talknationradio

The CIA has been so busy consulting on Zero Dark Thirty, not to mention funding Hamid Karzai, bribing Russians, lying about weapons, and conducting humanitarian drone murders, that it didn't have any time at all to help out with Hit and Stay, and yet arguably the latter turned out to be the better film despite such a severe handicap.  You can check it out at http://hitandstay.com

This is a film about people taking risks to prevent killing rather than to engage in it.  The focus is on the Catonsville Nine action on May 17, 1968, 45 years ago this Friday.  That action, in which activists burned draft cards and apologized for burning papers rather than children, was preceded by the Baltimore Four action of October 27, 1967, in which four activists poured their blood on draft papers.  It was followed by countless other actions, leading right up to the Transform Plowshares action in Tennessee for which three are currently awaiting sentencing.

The Catonsville action received so much publicity that it had something of an Occupy effect.  That is, others who felt the same way about the slaughter of the Vietnamese people but didn't believe they could do anything, suddenly began doing something.  Some did very similar actions.  Others tried their own approaches to the same problem.  Catonsville Nine inspired other tactics, enlarged marches and rallies, and generally moved the peace movement forward.  The creativity and novelty of the action even made people think about the war who hadn't before.

Draft records were destroyed, preventing the drafting of those people.  So, this was substantive resistance that couldn't be undone.  At the same time it was educational and inspirational.  It didn't inspire sadistic shouts of "Bin Laden's dead!"  It inspired people to act on their moral outrage.  There were over 100 actions taken at draft boards over the next few years.  Many thousands of people's draft records were destroyed, saving them from the draft and saving those they would have killed from that fate.  Some of the draft offices were shut down permanently.  In the end the Selective Service declared it was under assault, and Nixon declared that the military would now be volunteer. 

Some of the actions went after FBI offices and U.S. attorneys offices.  Activists never yet apprehended stole COINTELPRO documents and sent them to the media, exposing the FBI's abuses and creating a major news story that lasted until it was overshadowed by the Pentagon Papers -- released by Dan Ellsberg, himself inspired by the activism shown in Hit and Stay.  The people shown engaging in these actions are, in many cases, still active today -- although they look a bit older.  In other cases, their sons and daughters are still involved. 

The name "Hit and Stay" comes from the method of engaging in civil disobedience (or civil resistance for those who prefer to point to laws being upheld through the violation of other laws deemed less important) and then staying at the scene of the crime to take responsibility.  This was a communications strategy, not a masochistic drive toward suffering.  Some of the Catonsville Nine went into hiding to avoid their trial and remain active, even after having stood still long enough to be arrested and charged.

The film shows us the Milwaukee 14, the DC 9 who went after the Dow Chemical Company, and the New York 8.  The New York activists hit more than one location and chose not to stay.  Instead, they held a press conference to claim responsibility without identifying who was at which location or agreeing to answer questions.  They were not prosecuted. 

We see the Boston 2, the Rhode Island Political Offensive For Freedom (RIPOFF) -- modeled after the New York 8.  We see the Rochester Flower City Conspiracy, the Buffalo, the Camden 28.  That last one was encouraged, assisted, and then busted by an informant, but in the trial the judge allowed defense witnesses including people like Howard Zinn.  The jury nullified the law by acquitting defendants who openly admitted to their actions.  The jury joined in singing "Amazing Grace," and the foreman threw a party for the defendants.

Activists have not entirely figured out how to counter the brilliant move of creating a "volunteer" poverty draft, but neither has it shut down resistance in quite the way as is generally imagined.  The stories of these long-ago actions and so many thousands of actions since still inspire.  And resistance is in many ways greater now.  Wars are protested before they even start, and sometimes prevented from starting.  There is much to inspire us in independent media reports of nonviolent actions today, but I suspect this movie has the power to inspire us further. 

Jack Gilory has written a short 2-act play called The Predator.  The script is available here.

The characters include a college student, a drone pilot, a senator, and a peace activist.  The drone pilot supports war.  The senator supports herself.  The peace activist opposes murder.  And the student is almost in agreement with the peace activist.  All four of them turn toward the audience at the end of the play and ask "What do you think?"

What a great way to start a discussion!  The play has been performed or read at Georgetown, Syracuse, and Wittenberg Universities, among other venues.  It would make a great event in YOUR town and requires no expenses, just four people who can read lines.  Try it out.

Local resolutions have helped advance many issues, including war opposition, when they've been passed in large numbers.  When we passed a resolution in Charlottesville, Va., last year opposing any attack on Iran, I heard from numerous cities that wanted to do the same.  As far as I know, none did.  I heard back from some that they'd been told it was anti-Semitic to oppose a U.S. attack on Iran.  I didn't have an answer to that -- not a printable one anyway.

Mark Zuckerberg's complaint box is filling up.  The billionaire founder of FaceBook is behaving as destructively as other sociopaths who hoard vast riches while others starve and die for lack of medical care.  And people are letting him know how they feel about it. 

Zuckerberg's new advocacy group FWD.us is running TV ads in support of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  A petition asks him to stop.  The comments that people are leaving on the petition ask him to do a number of other things I won't repeat.  You'll never guess what they've found that rhymes with Zuck.

It's not enough to point out that our political system is completely corrupted by money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas.  Of course it is.  And if we had direct democracy, polls suggest we would be investing in green energy.  But saying the right thing to a pollster on a phone or in a focus group is hardly the extent of what one ought sensibly to do when the fate of the world is at stake.