[Kzyxtalk] MP3 Link for interview with Andrew Cockburn at KMEC Radio -- Killer Drones and Hi-Tech Assassins

[sako4 at comcast.net]

***** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***** 




KMEC Radio, 105.1 FM, in Ukiah, CA, presented a special edition on Monday, November 2, that we called, " Killer Drones: Analysis and Protest of the Bureaucracy of Murder" . 




Andrew Cockburn was our guest. Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine . 




To hear the show, click on the following MP3 link: http://www.kmecradio.org/a/21995/ 




Run time is 43 minutes, 29 seconds. 




For more about Cockburn, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cockburn 




John Sakowicz and Sid Cooperrider were our hosts and producers for this show. 


_________________________________________________ 

ANDREW COCKBURN 

Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine , KMEC Radio is grateful for the interview, because Cockburn gives only a very limited number of interviews. Cockburn is author of the recently released book Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins . The November 2 show with him follows up on recent series of shows at KMEC Radio that we've been doing about drones and remote killing with guests like Diane Roark, Melvin Goodman, and Ray McGovern. 

Earlier this month, Cockburn stated: "The recent leak of documents from inside the military’s assassination machine to The Intercept have given us an interesting look at the bureaucracy of murder that has grown up in our government in the last 15 years. Most essentially, the slides made public by a whistleblower reveal a record of failure -- an operation called Haymaker described in the documents, for example, killed 200 people, of which 35 were the intended targets. 

"But why has the assassination program been such a dismal failure in terms of its stated purpose? (It's been a huge success in further enriching and empowering controllers of the national security apparatus.) 

"In discussing problems encountered by the killing machine, the leaked documents continually blame inadequate resources -- especially drones that are too slow and too few. In other words they echo the perennial military plea for more money, a doubtless unintended by-product of the leak. Understanding why -- after a decade and a half of war in which 'high value targeting,' as the official euphemism terms it, has been our principal military strategy -- the enemy now rules millions of people in an area the size of Britain, requires knowledge not only of the way the relevant technology works, and doesn’t work, but also the bureaucratic and corporate forces propelling the system. 

"In my book Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins , I lay out the realities behind the vaunted 'precision' of assassination technology -- how one of the principle drone cameras has 20/200 vision, which is the legal definition of blindness in the United States; how the U.S. military discovered that killing enemy leaders inevitably generates an increase in enemy attacks, and ignored the intelligence; how and why high value targeting became our key strategy in the drug war, and thereby promoted the supply of drugs; how and why the CIA turned into an assassination machine; how and why the U.S. Air Force evolved a strategy of assassination that predates the appearance of drones." 



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KMEC RADIO 




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Our shows stream live at: www.kmec radio.org 




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Thank you. 




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