Not content with suppressing current information, the US Air Force has now (on orders from the administration, one suspects) begun revising the past with regard to our drone strikes:
To be brutally honest, I do not think that this obsession with scrubbing the past squeaky clean is at all unique to the Obama administration. I think the same (or worse) would have occurred under Mitt Romney. The urge is common to statists and corporatists everywhere, and of little concern to the political hacks of both major parties, who seem only concern with acquiring the power to choose the targets of our killing machines.
In a sense, we have already become Skynet. We are merely the captive organic pieces of the machine.
As scrutiny and debate over the use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) by the American military increased last month, the Air Force reversed a policy of sharing the number of airstrikes launched from RPAs in Afghanistan and quietly scrubbed those statistics from previous releases kept on their website.
Last October, Air Force Central Command started tallying weapons releases from RPAs, broken down into monthly updates. At the time, AFCENT spokeswoman Capt. Kim Bender said the numbers would be put out every month as part of a service effort to “provide more detailed information on RPA ops in Afghanistan.”
The Air Force maintained that policy for the statistics reports for November, December and January. But the February numbers, released March 7, contained empty space where the box of RPA statistics had previously been.
Additionally, monthly reports hosted on the Air Force website have had the RPA data removed — and recently.But because this is the information age--something you'd think an outfit that flies supersonic bombers would know about--you can still view the old versions (with the numbers) here.
To be brutally honest, I do not think that this obsession with scrubbing the past squeaky clean is at all unique to the Obama administration. I think the same (or worse) would have occurred under Mitt Romney. The urge is common to statists and corporatists everywhere, and of little concern to the political hacks of both major parties, who seem only concern with acquiring the power to choose the targets of our killing machines.
In a sense, we have already become Skynet. We are merely the captive organic pieces of the machine.
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