punditman says...
In past wars, there was some measurable degree of moral outrage when it came to killing civilians. But nowadays, it seems this little inconvenience is considered by many people to be...well...a little inconvenience—if they notice at all. Instead, there seems to be more concern about the misdeeds of Lindsay Lohan or the fact that LeBron James decided to play basketball for another city and he announced it by doing an hour-long TV "tweet" to promote his brand. The shock! The horror! Fans are burning James' jersey while giving a pass to the Pentagon's killer drones that kill 10 civilians for every "bad guy." Has society become this pathetic, shallow and ignorant? Punditman hopes not...
"Complaints about civilian casualties have also stirred concern among human rights advocates."
The problem is that a sentence like this — arguably a dead sentence, with a few quasi-facts entombed in an inert moral sensibility — parades as serious news. I mean, it’s lifted straight from the New York Times: from a story about drones, the CIA hit list and our cool new PlayStation way of killing bad dudes (and everyone else in the vicinity). Someone with an active conscience could come upon a sentence like that, in the middle of a painfully ill-focused story on the endless war, and think she must be going insane.
As an archeological find, it’s worth examining in closer detail, but first let me put it in context. The use of pilotless aircraft in Pakistan and Afghanistan to assassinate Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamic, America-hating insurgents — with missiles, no less — seems to have hit a snag of legal controversy lately because of the news that one of the people on the list of targets, Anwar al-Awlaki, was born in New Mexico. He’s an American citizen.
