Senator Angus King: Drones Are ‘A More Humane Weapon’

These Independents are a menace. What is with these Maine folks who keep forgetting about the Constitution? Before the video, just a refresher on part of the NDAA.

Senator Angus King (I., Maine) appeared on MSNBC Friday to review his Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that pressed CIA Director nominee John Brennan about the White House’s drone program.

King spoke in favor of drones, describing the targeting killings as “smart artillery” and “civilized.” King did clarify that due process must be included in drone strikes. Sure.

NDAA: (For those who want more info: John Conners on the NDAA  and the ACLU  for more on U,S, soil is cosidered a battlefied).

In a stunning move that has civil libertarians stuttering with disbelief, the U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America.

Quote:

The National Defense Authorization Act is being called the most traitorous act ever witnessed in the Senate, and the language of the bill is cleverly designed to make you think it doesn’t apply to Americans, but toward the end of the bill it essentially says it can apply to Americans ”if we want it to.”

Quote:

This bill, passed late last night in a 93-7 vote, declares the entire USA to be a ”battleground” upon which U.S. military forces can operate with impunity, overriding Posse Comitatus and granting the military the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate and even assassinate U.S. citizens with impunity.

Quote:

Even WIRED magazine was outraged at this bill, reporting: Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial …the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Maine independent Sen. Angus King made the case that the use of drone warfare actually is not as evil as some of the detractors have suggested.

According to King, drones are less likely to inflict casualties upon civilians than other military operations undertaken in the last 1,000 years of warfare.

“To be honest, I believe that drones are a lot more civilized than what we used to do, you know, when [William Tecumseh] Sherman shelled Atlanta or when the Allies firebombed Dresden in World War II, it was all collateral damage. It was virtually all civilians. And that’s the way — that was the way of war until very recently,” he said. “The drones, although there is some collateral damage, basically is a very smart artillery shell. And we’ve been shooting artillery shells over miles and miles for many years and hoping they hit the right target. I think there’s just something creepy about drones that they can be controlled and people are uneasy about it. But if you put it in a context of 1,000 years of war, I think it’s actually a more humane weapon because it can be targeted to specific enemies and specific people.”