The news from Pakistan seems to be getting worse by the day. On Wednesday, a massive bombing in the Lower Dir district killed 7, including 3 US soldiers disguised as Pakistanis, and wounded at least 130 others.
The day before, the US launched the largest coordinated drone strike inside Pakistan to date. According to Pakistani authorities, 9 drones fired 18 missiles, killing at least 31 people. This strike was the latest in an unprecedented wave of recent attacks. Just last month, for example, there were a record 12 strikes in the country, a nearly threefold increase over last year.
To protest the increasing use of drones in war, a group of activists with Peace of the Action unfurled a banner last month (video above) at a military unmanned aerial vehicle exhibit in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, reading “Drones Kill Kids.” This action is but the latest in a growing campaign against the drones, which we’ve been keeping close tabs on.
Wow, this is great to see. I used to go to that museum every weekend when I was a kid. I remember vividly when my mother (who worked at the Smithsonian) was vitally involved in the controversy about how to represent the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima (I got to sit in the bomb bay before the exhibit opened!). It’s good to see that museum become the site of impassioned social debate that it deserves to be.
Those weapons are really remarkable products of human imagination that deserve to be in a museum, and absolutely nowhere else.