I realize that in the “Chair Force” post below I might have lost some of the moral perspective Chris Floyd lends in this piece:
Again, the point here is that a truly serious and sophisticated analysis of the situation would have stopped at the very beginning: “We are killing hundreds of innocent civilians, with robots, in a country we’re not at war with — one of our allies, in fact. What in the name of all that’s holy – and all that’s human – is driving our nation to commit these monstrous crimes, and how can we stop it?” That would be the issue under discussion. A truly serious and sophisticated analysis would not accept the hideous assertions and assumptions of state terrorists at face value, would not concern itself with the “process” by which imperial factions fight it out for the honor of perpetrating these atrocities – and would certainly not offer as its conclusion the earnest hope that the authors of these war crimes will find some way of doing them better….
In fact, losing moral perspective is the one thing Floyd finds wanting in Mayer’s piece. But would she be staff writer for the New Yorker with all the access that implies if she screamed out the obvious? Probably not….
Yet here she is blatantly contradicting her own reportage, the indisputable facts that she herself has uncovered. But such are the inevitable, wrenching cognitive dissonances that arise when you accept the basic assumptions of the militarist system — which you must do, to some extent, to get a seat at the “serious” table in America’s media-political establishment. She is probably not even aware that she is doing it; she is simply following the standard template for “process stories,” which require stark contrasts between the protagonists, who are usually cast in good guy-bad guy mold. In this case, the protagonists are the two state apparatuses — the Pentagon and the CIA — who wield the power of faceless, remote-control death over innocent, undefended human beings. In this “process,” it is the unregulated CIA killers who are the bad guys, and so the Pentagon must be recast as a stickler for accountability all the way up the line, despite the mountain of evidence against this ludicrous interpretation — evidence which, we must emphasize again, Mayer herself has been instrumental in compiling.
Floyd’s written a very good piece here. Where’s the outrage on the Predator story? Right here. Read the whole piece.