Drone Kills: ‘They Bring Billions of Dollars, Nothing Else Matters’

Kinane touched upon recent polls showing the majority of US residents support drone strikes in foreign countries.

“In the US people are very heavily propagandized by our mainstream media … [which] does not encourage critical thinking, thinking outside this bubble that most of us live in this country,” the activist argued.

Another explanation is a “very strong drone industry … that’s growing very rapidly in the United States”, Kinane points out, indicating that the drone industry lobbies the Congress, lets the media generate huge profit from advertising, grants money to scientists and provides local firms with jobs.

“They don’t want to look at pockets of resistance that are critical of lethal drones,” the activist says, simply because the drone industry brings in “enormous amounts of money.”

“I would go so far as to say that many of our wars in Western Asia, in the Middle East, the US wouldn’t be involved in were not for capitalist profit motives,” Kinane argues.

“So that contributes to environment, where people don’t really think very critically about who is really being harmed by the drones. It’s like US lives are so important and Afghan lives are so unimportant,” the expert described.

“It’s that old US exceptionalism, that disease of our mind that we have here,” he added.

Commenting on a possibility of killer drone strikes being properly investigated sometime in the future, the activist expressed skepticism.

“The US invaded Iraq in 2003, and I was there then. Those are very criminal activities on  the part of US government and the Pentagon. And yet, none of those folks … have gone to prison. Our justice system here in the US is very lacking in justice,” Kinane says.

The expert argued that Obama’s drone campaign is abusive of international law and even undermines it.

“The whole drone campaign is ultimately damaging to the US: it’s not making the world safer, not engendering respect by the people of the world for the United States and it’s leading to proliferation, which makes us less safe,” he described.

In addition to being ineffective, the expert claims there are no honest reports publicized on the use of drones.

“Often, the US doesn’t know who is killed. Our statistics are very shaky,” Kinane says. “Unfortunately at this time our government is not transparent.”

“What we have is in fact not a war on terrorism, but a war of terrorism – these drones terrorize human beings,” the activist argues. “The drones are instruments of terror.”

“The US intelligence on the ground is very weak, and its signal intelligence is also very vulnerable to misinterpretation,” Kinane said.