Droning on: the rise of the machines

Abstract

Five activists have been sentenced for their role in a protest against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan at a New York military base last year. The activists were arrested at the New York Air National Guard base at Hancock Field near Syracuse, New York. They draped themselves in white clothes splattered with blood-red pigment and then staged a ‘‘die-in’’ at the main entrance to the base. The group calls themselves the Hancock 38 Drone Resisters. Thirty-three of the activists were sentenced in December. On Wednesday, the remaining five were sentenced to fines and a one-year conditional discharge 1 Mike Davis once referred to the car bomb as the ‘‘quotidian workhorse of urban terrorism’’ (Davis 2007). The point seems quaint these days. In the interceding half decade or so, the car bomb has changed sides, enlisted in the Air Force, and grown wings (think of the money we save on parking). We refer, of course, to the drone—that piece of solitary, guiltless, menacing, and wonderfully affordable machinery that is enabling police actions all over the oily parts of the globe. Part sterile male bee, part Robocop, part national security IUD, part engine of the San Diego economy, this amazing new toy of national diplomacy has the ability to camouflage itself even on the front page of the New York Times. Its opposite is not so lucky. Locally, the quotidian