The drone operators sit before glowing screens at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the command-and-control facility at Creech airforce base, Nevada, and tip-tap on a console to send missiles spearing onto targets in some dusty region of a far-off land.
 
A missile from a drone guided from Nevada reduced a house in Miranshah in North Waziristan to rubble last January 23, crushing 13 civilians to death. The gamesters at Creech had been told that the coordinates referred to a building or bunker or whatever – theirs not to reason why – occupied by insurgents/terrorists/Taliban/Al Qaida, whatever. Legitimate targets of one sort or another. Three children and five women were among the dead.
14 women and children were killed in a village near Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in North Waziristan on May 19, 2009 when the cluster of homes they lived in was demolished by a Nevada-triggered drone bomb. A NATO spokesman explained that the victims been thought to be “aiding insurgents”.
On January 5, 2006 a drone aimed at Al Qaida number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, demolished a house near Demadola, seven kilometres from the Afghan border. Al-Zawahiri wasn’t there. None of the family of eight whose home it was survived.
Seven days later, a drone destroyed three houses in Demadola, killing 22 civilians, including five women and five children.
Geoff Simons, author of Drone Diplomacy, estimates that 2,043 civilians have been killed by US drones in Pakistan, in the last five years.
Philip Alston, UN special representative on extrajudicial executions, is quoted in the Guardian lamenting the “PlayStation mentality” of operators playing video-games with targets dehumanised and apprehended as virtual constructs.
Now Obama has signed an order authorising the deployment of drones in yet another country, Libya. Alston comments: “I am particularly concerned that the US asserts an ever-expanding entitlement to target individuals across the globe, an ill-defined licence to kill without accountability”.
If the President authorising these pitiless assaults in which innocent people predictably perish had a white skin and a Southern drawl, preparations for his visit to Ireland would be heavily shadowed by the certainty of angry protest.
It is the act of a coward to sit at ease sipping coffee before a video screen and zoom in on a house 12,000 miles away casually to obliterate people about whom you know nothing. By which reckoning, Obama is Coward-in-Chief.
 
I gather from the Irish Times that a local man identified by another local man as Obama’s eighth cousin is spearheading the tidy-up operation in the village of Moneygall, Co. Offaly, whence, it is speculated, an ancestor of the President’s may once have lived, possibly.
Excitement is mounting towards new peaks of dizziness as the opportunity arises to infantilise ourselves anew for the televised entertainment of a global audience. Arra bejayshus. All manner of Obama-related paddywack knick-knacks are being polished and prepared for shameless display. Toothless grins not seen in public since Independent TD Din-Joe Muldoon returned in triumph from Dublin following that embezzlement business are being perfected in cracked mirrors throughout the three parishes. The Offaly senior bog-trotter squad is practising its formation yelping every night in the Darby O’Gill Discorama.
An eighth cousin? How’d they work that one out? Anybody could be anybody’s eighth cousin. For all I know, I am an eighth cousin of Bono’s. Maybe I am PJ Harvey’s eighth cousin. I’d tidy up the house if I thought she was coming.
Ms. Harvey launched her recent album, Let England Shake, on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning politics programme on BBC, wearing a feather boa on her head, improvising on an autoharp. There’s been comment. Was Marr, the BBC’s political ratings-topper, not rather lowering his tone by featuring a singer of such eccentric mien, some bubble-brain demanded to know.
Marr has allowed that having Ms. Harvey on his show had been “a mistake, possibly”.
I have decided to take umbrage at this insult to a relative.
Marr is the jaundiced journo who took out a super-injunction to stifle freedom of the press and prevent publication of the fact that he’d fathered a child with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Except that he’d gotten it wrong. He wasn’t the father at all. Having shown himself a knave, he acted like a fool.
He’s also the fellow who stood outside Downing Street on April 9, 2003 as the blood-tide closed in over Baghdad and smiled serenely into the camera: “Tony Blair said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right...”
You’d think that a man of such personal, professional and ethical ineptitude would be grateful that a woman of Ms. Harvey’s accomplishments would give him the time of day, much less agree to enliven his ponderous programme. But no.
All this is brought on by the fact that Let England Shake, with all its shrieking despair and poetical longing, its fierce and angry reverie – “Take me back to England... the grey, damp filthiness of ages” – has been in my ears for the past month as I’ve pounded the hard pavements of democracy while striving to cleanse my mind of the distressing images from Offaly, and it’s helped me make it through the shite.
That, plus the fact that I won’t stand idly by while a member of the family is slagged off.