I recently signed up for Twitter (@DavidMizner). The influx of info and verbiage is a bit overwhelming, at least for me, but on Twitter you're privy to valuable links and interesting exchanges, like this one between Zaid Jilani and Chris Bowers. Jilani calls out Bowers for not running campaigns on drones and the NDAA. To which Bowers says:
I don't do campaigns that will flop due to lack of interest.
To which I reply: hunh? There's clearly considerable interest here.
Jesselyn Radack has placed more than 250 posts about counterterrorism abuses on the rec list, including
many specifically about
drones and
targeted killing. I, too, often write about the War of Terror (or I did when I was posting here frequently), and
many of
them were
well received.
One on the NDAA hit the top of the rec list. Opposition to the 2012 NDAA was
widespread and loud. Many popular diarists here -- like
OPOL,
Joe Shickspack, and
Joanneleon -- often focus on this stuff, as do some, if not all, of the site's
beloved cartoonists.
Interest here in the War of Terror is medium wide and quite deep; many of the people who care care a lot, as evidenced by the massive response to Armando's post defending President Obama's policy on drones. Certainly, issues like fighting austerity and gay rights attract wider interest. But consider some of the issues Daily Kos has chosen for campaigns. Was there great interest in trying to prevent President Obama from naming Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense? Or in urging the FEC to investigate Michelle Bachman?
In the back and forth, Bowers said he's a listener, not a leader, so please listen up. The U.S. War on Terror -- which is really a collection of secret, dirty undeclared wars -- is doing incalculable damage. It's killing children and other civilians, terrorizing entire communities, undermining constitutional and human rights, bringing the U.S. government into close alliance with tyrants and war lords, making a mockery of U.S. democracy, and feeding the National Security State and those who benefit from it, such as defense contractors. Like all war, it's killing the poor while enriching the rich. Oh, and it's also putting Americans in danger, as no less an establishment-man than Tom Brokaw has acknowledged:
...[W]e also have to examine the use of drones that the United States is involved--and there are a lot of civilians who are innocently killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. And I can tell you having spent a lot of time over there, young people will come up to me on the streets and say, we love America, but if you harm one hair on the head of my sister, I will fight you forever and there is this enormous rage against what they see in that part of the world as a presumptuousness of the United States.
And trust me, Chris, many of us care.
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Preview of Rich Rowley's and Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars: