Medea Benjamin will speak at Random Row Books in Charlottesville, Va. at 7 p.m. on Friday, May 4th.
Random Row Books
315 West Main Street
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Free. Open to the Public.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Global Exchange and of CodePink: Women for Peace. She is the author of the new book “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control” and was an organizer of the Drone Summit held this past weekend in Washington, D.C.
Benjamin was forcibly removed on Monday from a speech by White House Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan, who defended the use of drones to kill in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Medea asked him: “How many people are you willing to sacrifice? Why are you lying to the American people and not saying how many innocents have been killed? I speak out on behalf of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old in Pakistan, who was killed because he wanted to document the drone strikes. I speak out on behalf of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old born in Denver, killed in Yemen, just because his father was someone who we don’t like. I speak out on behalf of the Constitution, on behalf of the rule of law. I love the rule of law, I love my country, you are making us less safe by killing so many innocent people.”
Benjamin was a guest last week on Talk Nation Radio
https://davidswanson.org/talknationradio
And on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/27/as_obama_expands_drone_war_activists
Associated Press: “Pakistan on Monday condemned a U.S. drone strike that killed three suspected Islamist militants in the northwest, the first since the country’s parliament demanded that Washington end the attacks two weeks ago.”
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/red-cross-british-worker-killed-pakistan-16237610#.T6AMG47W-D4
Domestic Drones Flying from Five Locations in Virginia, Sixty-Three in United States
Welcome home, war!
The FAA has released a list of drone certificates. Drones are being flown by the military, by police forces, by drone companies, by universities, small towns, and counties. (Read more at the link.)
Here in Virginia, Virginia Tech in Blacksburg has an active drone flying certificate. VCU in Richmond has one that’s listed as expired. The Marines in Quantico, the U.S. Army in Northern Virginia, and DARPA in Northern Virginia also fly drones, but nobody knows where in the U.S. they fly them.