Remote control war – a look at the daily grind of Predator pilots

What's it like to kill human beings by dropping bombs with the push of buttons on your computer keyboard 7,000 miles away? Imaging doing this every work day, then driving home to hug your wife and kids every night. This video from FrontLine will give you a good idea of what it's like. Whatever your emotional reaction to this form of "warfare," you will find someone agreeing with you (and disagreeing with you) in the comments following the video. If our enemies were using robotic planes to drop bombs on American soil, I suspect that we'd be outraged, much more than by conventional warfare. This is certainly a sterile way of war, no matter how much the supervisors remind the pilots that they are killing human beings. If I understood why we are at "war" in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe then I could understand whether these drones are furthering our "war objectives."

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Flight 1549 versus Gaza: American lives are much more important than Palestinian lives

When we compare the good result of the water-landing of Flight 1549 with the indiscriminate "collateral damage" occurring in Gaza, we can only conclude one thing:  American lives are much more important than Palestinian lives.   After all, saving those 155 American lives was "miraculous," according to American media reports (listen…

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Since John McCain has made this campaign about character, let’s talk about character.

Jeffrey Klein has made a compelling case that there is something McCain is not telling us about his military service or, rather, that he is not being forthright about some of the claims he is making.   Since McCain has made this campaign about character, let's talk about character.  Let's start…

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What do you do when a cat poops on the airplane after you almost die in a plane crash?

Last night, I was flying from St. Louis to Minneapolis to participate in the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform.  I was flying in a small jet (the kind that holds about 60 passengers). As we approached the Minneapolis airport, we started going through storm clouds.  Undeterred, the pilot started…

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