One morning in late September 2011, a group of American drones took off from an airstrip the C.I.A. had built in the remote southern expanse of Saudi Arabia.
A group of men who had just finished breakfast scrambled to get to their trucks. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher, born in New Mexico, who had evolved from a peddler of Internet hatred to a senior operative in Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.
Two of the Predator drones pointed lasers on the trucks to pinpoint the targets, while the larger Reapers took aim. The Reaper pilots, operating their planes from thousands of miles away, readied for the missile shots, and fired.
For what was apparently the first time since the Civil War, the United States government had carried out the deliberate killing of an American citizen as a wartime enemy and without a trial. New York Times, 9 March 2013
CHICAGO— When I was 8-years old I was obsessed with this video game on Super Nintendo called Starfox. Like most video games the player, using a controller, pilots a ship that fires on and pulverizes anything and everything in a land far away. Fittingly, Starfox always comes to mind when I read about drone attacks such as the one described above.
The evolution of technology, from which we all benefit, has enabled the government to employ national security in a quasi video game way, with controllers far away using machines to eliminate those determined by the state to be a threat. As citizens we aren't truly aware of who is deciding to kill whom. The President, who is in his 2008 campaign talked about protecting the Constitution, has employed these furtive drone strikes more than his predecessor. And when we the people ask questions about this program he insults us by telling us we don't know exactly what we're talking about, which raises the question of why don't we know.
Malcolm X once said that the new media is "the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses." Malcolm, as he occasionally did, was exaggerating a bit, but he wasn't far off. The news media does have tremendous control over what the public knows and so when reporters who are supposed to be adversaries of power are often quite the opposite, it has chilling consequences.
Michael Grunwald is Time magazine's top national security reporter. He is one of the most influential reporters in Washington and when al-Awlaki was killed Grunwald tweeted: "I don't even get why I'm SUPPOSED to care about the American we iced in Yemen." Today Grunwald out did himself when he advocated for the killing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that kills Julian Assange."
al-Awlaki may have been an Al-Qaeda cleric who advocated terrorist polices and Assange may indeed be a snake nobody likes, but that does not mean the government should be using drones to kill them without any sort of due process or trial, especially in al-Awlaki's case since he was an American citizen from New Mexico. What's disturbing here isn't just one heartless hack being gleefully okay with the state murdering people because the latter's politics are distasteful. No, what's worse is that Grunwald is one of the country's top reporters. A man who is supposed to challenge secret government policies is now openly advocating for them. But Grunwald isn't an isolated case, the entire media establishment is rotten with state propagandists such as Grunwald.
When the late Michael Hastings disclosed the antics of General Stanley McChrystal, the Afghanistan commander was fired by Obama. Hastings reporting in Rolling Stone was heralded by many, but CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan wasn't one of them. Logan went on CNN and attacked Hastings for, of all things, betraying McChrystal! Logan said Hastings should have told McChrystal and company to stop with their insults of Obama and Biden. It wasn't McChrystal's responsibility to filter himself, instead the onus was on the reporter. She also accused Hastings of lying for presenting himself as a friend of McChrystal's and then using what he learned against the general. Why should a reporter ever be friends with those he/she is reporting on? Logan didn't explain, she did, however actually say of Hastings: "Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has.” That last comment exposed Logan for the servant she is. In what journalism school is it okay for a reporter to attack another reporter's patriotism because the latter had the audacity to report news?
Grunwald and Logan are just two examples of the media establishment's problem. These reporters aren't actually looking out for our interests because if they were, they wouldn't be partying with the powerful at the Correspondents Dinner or going to their weddings and birthday parties and book signing like the new book This Town exposes. The modern media establishment types are not adversaries to power, they are servants to power. These people are their friends and buddies, so it would be foolish for us to assume that reporters could ever actually, you know, report on them.
Technological advances may have given us futuristic killing machines, but as least we have the internet and some fearless reporters who aren't beholden to the media corporate behemoths, which have become propaganda machines that put Baghdad Bob to shame.