It's been going on for so many years -- Predators cruising, looking for their prey. Some attention has since been paid to the phenomenon and to the devastating effect their actions have had on their victims, but it hasn't really mattered. The predation has
only spread.
Oh, before I go any further, let me clear up one possible bit of confusion. I'm not talking about Charlie Rose, Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, or any of that crew of predators. I'm talking about America's robotic killers, the drones that long ago were grimly named
Predators (
retired this year) and their more advanced cousins, the
Reapers (as in Grim...), who have taken a
once-illegal American activity, political assassination, and made it the well-respected law of the land and increasingly of huge swaths of the globe.
In these years of predation, the president -- any president -- has become an
assassin-in-chief.
George W. Bush began the process with 50 drone strikes in the Greater Middle East during his years in office. Barack Obama multiplied those numbers tenfold. He even had his own White House "kill list" and "terror Tuesday" meetings to decide just who should be on it. Donald Trump has simply given the U.S. military and the CIA license to send those drones wherever they please. Such drone strikes are now commonplace from
Yemen (almost a strike a day in the months after Trump entered the Oval Office) to
Afghanistan (where the CIA has, for the first time, been given license to strike at will), Pakistan (where such strikes have recently
intensified) to Somalia (
23 of them in 2017), Iraq to...
Niger (where U.S. surveillance drones are now being weaponized).
In the process, across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, the U.S. has taken out not just terror suspects but civilians in significant numbers, including children and American citizens (two of whom were children). The drones, which terrorize the populations under them, have proven to be ferocious assassins, capable of crossing borders without a blink and without respect for national sovereignty, not to speak of remarkable recruitment tools for terror groups.
Comment: We all know by now Mueller is a dirty cop tasked with trying to bring down Trump. Unfortunately for him and his diet of nothing-burgers, the only thing that seems to have come out of it is rampant collusion between politicians and alphabet soup agencies. One can only hope that it will further expose how deep the corruption goes.