Several weeks ago, a 28-year-old Army vet, who had worked with drones during two tours in Iraq and is now a radical art student in New York, came up with a creative act of protest to raise awareness around the growing use of drones domestically by police forces across the country.

According to an article in last week’s New Yorker, over the course of several nights, the veteran (who remains anonymous) and a few friends posted eleven unusual street signs around New York City, which is apparently investigating using drones as a law enforcement tool.

Designed to look exactly like official street signs, the fake NYPD signs had several different messages: “ATTENTION: Drone Activity in Progress,” or “ATTENTION: Local Statutes Enforced by Drones,” or “ATTENTION: Authorized Drone Strike Zone, 8am-8pm, Including Sunday.”

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Nick Turse has published a revealing overview of the dramatic proliferation of US Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Systems entitled “Inside our drone base empire.” As Turse, a senior editor of Alternet.org, writes:

They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.

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The 792nd consecutive weekly vigil outside of Alliant Techsystems in Minneapolis in August.

As I mentioned in this space earlier, I was recently in Barcelona at the War Resisters International’s seminar on War Profiteering and Peace Movement Responses. It was a really interesting time to be a Yankee abroad. The streets in the city center filled up with protests against budget cuts each evening, and everyone at the meetings was talking about OccupyWallStreet in slightly awed and disbelieving tones—as though to say “even the U.S. of A. is getting with the program.”

I was repeatedly asked where I thought the Occupy Movement was headed, a question I cleverly avoided—“look, is that a tapas bar over there? How do you say, ‘more wine, please’ in Spanish?” It is a good question, but as Donald Rumsfeld used to say: “that’s above my pay grade.”

At the end of each long day participating in different seminar tracks (war and exploitation of natural resources, exposing the bad guys, new trends in war profiteering) and workshops on how to research the arms trade, use social media and campaign against drone warfare, we gathered in the city center for the Trobada, convened by the Center for Study of Justice and Peace (Centre d’Estudis per a la Pau JM Delàs). Lots of people turned out for these nightly events, the one at which I presented drew more than one hundred people on a Friday night (but no one in Barcelona eats dinner before 10 pm anyway).

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A friend of mine once called Las Vegas “the Lourdes of America.”  People come looking for a miracle, but it’s the casinos that mostly cash in.  This doesn’t stop the 36 million pilgrims who travel annually to this neon oasis, searching for some indefinable fulfillment, away from home, untethered from their habitual routines and inhibitions, a little off-balance, spending money like the water that is rapidly disappearing in this overbuilt desert.

Las Vegas always feels a little like Wall Street on steroids—or is it the other way around?  This past Saturday, October 8, more that 1,000 people made this point intentionally or not as they brought the Occupy movement to the Strip.  Setting off from the New York New York casino, they voiced a common frustration at the deepening economic inequality in the United States and the increasing financial pain in their city, where the home foreclosure calamity grows daily.

This demonstration, like those spreading across America in over 1,300 cities, sharpened one facet of the crisis we face today.

Two protests the next morning highlighted another one.

Peace and justice advocates caravanned north from Las Vegas along Interstate 95 on Sunday, October 9 to take action together at the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site) and Creech Air Force Base, which operates drone aircraft being used around the world.

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The people who’ve come from around the country to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. helped fulfill their promise to “Stop the Machine” by entering, and ultimately closing down for the day, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. They chose the museum for its glorification of weaponry in general, its special exhibit on unmanned flying drones in particular, and the tribute it pays to the arms industry by naming its IMAX theater after Lockheed Martin.

Today’s action was proposed at Friday night’s General Assembly meeting on the plaza, most vocally by David Swanson—creator of, as well as much else, WarIsACrime.org. Some initially objected that its meaning might be lost on onlookers, but the idea prevailed.

The march itself—or “stroll,” as it was called, to avoid militaristic jargon—started around 2 p.m. today and reached the museum about half an hour later. Swanson was leading the march, together with members of Code Pink and a contingent of young Wisconsinites. (Also in the lead was confessed agent provocateur Patrick Howley, one of the “hundreds of earnest and principled reporters” whose careers The American Spectator claims to have launched.) Several protesters made it inside and, from the second floor, dropped a pink banner that said, “NO DRONES / END AFGHAN WAR.” But when as many as 500 “strolling” people surged up into the museum carrying signs and chanting, guards used pepper spray to repel them as they got just inside the doorway.

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• Hundreds of people have gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest against the recent expansion of the Egypt’s emergency law, amid palpable anger over the military’s handling of transition from autocratic rule.

• Eighteen people were killed today in Syria by security forces following Friday prayers, as scores of demonstrators are reported to have gathered in important cities and towns demanding an end to Bashar al-Assad’s rule and chanting “Death rather than humiliation.”

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis held a protest in the  southern city of Taiz on Friday, a day after security  forces opened fire at demonstrators leaving 10 people dead.

• Thousands of workers at Freeport-McMoran’s gold and copper mine in eastern Indonesia kicked off a monthlong strike Thursday to protest low wages, bringing production and shipments to a standstill.

• On Tuesday, about 50 activists protested drones outside the new London offices of General Atomics as part of the Day of Action by the ‘Stop the Arms Fair Coalition’ against DSEi (Defence & Security Equipment International) on its opening day.

• About 50 transit workers and union leaders barged into an MTA office building in downtown  Brooklyn Monday morning for a brief but boisterous protest rally over wages and benefits.

• Oil workers went on strike on Tuesday, halting construction of Colombia’s Bicentennial  Pipeline, which will be the country’s longest once completed.

• In Boulder, Colorado, more than 60 homeless people and activists took part in a protest and flash mob on Wednesday to raise awareness about the issue of homelessness.

• On Monday, locals protested in front of the municipality of Carthage calling for the halt of construction on the archeological site in Tunisia as a reaction to the resumption of activities in the site.

• Prospective homeowners in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk are demanding apartments or their money back — and have gone on hunger strike to push their point.

Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic congressman from Ohio, is leading a biparistan effort to end the US military intervention in Libya. Earlier this month, he was instrumental in compelling Republican leaders in Congress to pass a resolution criticizing President Obama’s refusal to seek approval for the conflict from the Capitol. Now, he’s leading a group of ten members of Congress who are filing a lawsuit against the president’s disregard of the War Powers Resolution in continuing the conflict.

At 2:17 in the above clip, Kucinich says:

This is about stopping a war now. This is not an academic question. This is about the primacy of the constitution in the affairs of our nation.

And more. Democrats like Kucinich, and Republicans like Ron Paul, are each finding reasons to oppose the war: questionable constitutionality, the absence of moral authority, and the spiraling cost—$10 million per day, reportedly.

Yesterday, the White House tried to explain itself with some crafty reasoning that the War Powers Resolution doesn’t really apply in this case because of the nature of the conflict:

U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith isn’t buying it. Nor is Cynthia McKinney, the former congresswoman who is currently on the ground in Tripoli, and who rejects the report’s downplaying of the hostilities—or, excuse me, “kinetic action”:

The people of the United States are not getting the truth from the government or the media about the massive destruction in Libya, including the killing of civilians by the NATO bombing campaign. I am here in Libya and we can see the carnage.

Besides, as David Swanson points out, “The Obama report to Congress spends half its time claiming that the United States is not part of the NATO operation in any major way, and the other half warning that the NATO operation would collapse without the United States.” The report continues:

If the United States military were to cease its participation in the NATO operation, it would seriously degrade the coalition’s ability to execute and sustain its operation designed to protect Libyan civilians and to enforce the no-fly zone and the arms embargo[.]

At worst, a contradiction; at best, a convenient gray area for the White House. The report’s logic is troubling to those of us who have noticed how the technologies of war-at-a-distance—like drones, cruise missiles, and smart bombs—only makes killing easier for governments to justify. It also raises important questions about the nature of engagement in multinational military coalitions.

Swanson has organized a statement of opposition to Obama as long as he continues supporting the wars. And, meanwhile, more than a quarter of the Senate has called on the president to scale back operations in Afghanistan next month, as promised.

I was on RT, Russia’s 24/7 English-language news channel, yesterday to talk about the news that the US has stepped up its covert war in Yemen in recent weeks with increased strikes by fighter jets and armed drones.

• Over 80,000 people took to the streets of Athens late Sunday on the 12th consecutive day of protests against the government’s draconian austerity measures. Some 3,000 people also gathered in Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki, according to the police.

• Syrians poured into the streets on Friday in some of the largest antigovernment protests yet despite the shutdown of much of Syria’s Internet network. At least 96 people have died over the past three days in the continued crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

• In Israel, thousands of people rallied in Tel Aviv to denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. It was one of the largest pro-peace rallies Israel has seen in years.

• Up to 23 people were killed and over 350 wounded on Sunday when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators stormed the border area from Syria.

• The March on Blair Mountain, with more than six hundred people setting out from Marmet, West Virginia on a fifty-mile, five-day journey began today to protest mountaintop removal, strengthen workers’ rights, and support investment in sustainable jobs for Appalachia.

• A two-day sit-in staged to protest against drone attacks concluded on Sunday with a warning to the relevant authorities that supplies to Nato forces in Afghanistan would be blocked if drone attacks continued.

• At least 30 people were injured when Indian police used teargas and batons to break up a mass anti-corruption protest led by India’s most famous yoga guru on Sunday.

• Approximately 250 supporters —including many veterans—converged on Saturday at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to rally for the release of alleged whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning.

• Sri Lanka’s powerful Buddhist clergy demonstrated Friday urging the president to restore rights of workers and students days after a violent police crackdown on a labour protest killed one factory worker.

• Three gay rights activists, including a former Democratic Senate candidate, were arrested last Thursday for their protest on the floor of the North Carolina House of Representatives.

• Fourteen students were arrested at the University of Washington on Wednesday evening on charges of criminal trespass after they refused to leave a building that was closed, as part of the ongoing protests over the UW’s contract with food-services provider Sodexo.

One might think that three wars—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—would be enough. Apparently, for the United States military apparatus, it’s not. Last month we noted that Congress is trying to amend the War on Terror authorization so as to include conflicts that have no direct relationship to attacks on US soil. Now, there’s word from the Pentagon that cyber attacks on US interests could be grounds for armed retaliation too. Reports the BBC:

In future, a US president could consider economic sanctions, cyber-retaliation or a military strike if key US computer systems were attacked, officials have said recently.

The planning was given added urgency by a cyber-attack last month on the defence contractor, Lockheed Martin.

A new report from the Pentagon is due out in a matter of weeks.

“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response. All appropriate options would be on the table,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters on Tuesday.

AntiWar.com points out that, by this logic, the Iranians are already justified in attacking the US with missiles, considering all the hackers the Pentagon has pointed at them.

When they come, the Pentagon seems to be assuming, we’ll be ready for ‘em. That’s why it has also just announced a plan to vastly expand its fleet of unmanned arial vehicles—armed, remote-controlled drones. These are the same weapons that have made it possible to carry on a shadow war for years now on the Pakistani frontier without need to officially declare that it is happening. With every new gizmo, apparently, it becomes easier and easier to justify killing.

It is a common hope that the latest technologies—smart bombs, stealth bombers, drones, cyber-attacks, and more—will save lives. In the short term, and in a narrow view of whose lives we’re concerned about, this may be true. But each makes violence easier to justify politically, by promising victory at the expense of fewer lives on one’s own side, and therefore each has the effect of bringing us closer to—if we’re not there already—a dystopian scenario of perpetual war. Opposing weapons like this is ostensibly tougher than opposing, say, nuclear weapons; there’s no instant cataclysm, no blinding light. What they promise, instead, is the dull hum of tit-for-tat killing—manageable, profitable, ignorable, almost sustainable, and yet a total, indefensible waste.