We Know Obama Uses Coward Drones to Inspire Hatred, Attacks Against Americans. We Don’t Know Why. But using Coward Drones has an unanticipated consequence: It makes people think we’re Cowards. — by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)

Hey! That’s not bin Laden! That’s a video-age journalist trying to cut through the haze of sound bites and atomized consciousness.

Afghan President Karzai and his brother distribute nearly all of the world’s Heroin. Karzai Heroin is now the leading cause of death for people under 30 in the Northeastern US, killing over 4,000 people annually in Massachusetts alone. — by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)

Not funny

A controversy has simmered for some years over the role of the United States, and particularly of its then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in the actions surrounding Operation Condor. Condor was an assassination and torture plan implemented by a number of South American countries, braintrusted by Pinochet’s Chile.

A new FOIA release, courtesy of the National Security Archive, shows that only five days before former high-ranking Allende official, Orlando Letelier, and his U.S. assistant, Ronnie Moffit, were assassinated by Chile’s notorious DINA secret service in Washington, DC, a September 16, 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger told his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor.

An Offshore Strategy using only special forces and drones is not a serious solution, and in some ways is even worse than our current escalation policy.

State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh has promised to produce the Obama administration’s legal justification for its increased use of drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists, reports Shane Harris of the National Journal.

A new report from the New America Foundation states that one of every three people killed in the U.S.’s not-so-secret drone war in Pakistan is a civilian. The report also discloses that none of the strikes in 2009 targeted Bin Laden, and that they have had little impact on the Taliban’s ability to plan operations [...]

U.S. drones killed 123 Pakistani civilians and three al Qaeda in January, the largest death toll ever for a single month. 17 more died today, some low-level militants, most civilians. Apparently the sharp increase in drone attacks is motivated by revenge, for the late December suicide attack that killed seven CIA drone-targeting experts in Afghanistan. All this in the context of the just-released Pentagon budget, which features a 75% increase in funding for drone production and operations.

The Obama Administration just unveiled a huge Defense Department budget for next year shaped by the Afghanistan war. War spending is exempt from the president’s proposed spending freeze, despite President Obama’s statement at West Point that, “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”