Detailed almost to a fault, Cockburn’s written the seminal piece of investigative reporting to come along in quite some time. Of course he’s forced to be incredibly detailed because he’s ultimately attacking serious power structures in the United States: the Pentagon, giant parasitic Defense contractors, the executive branch and establishment media, all face his unrelenting scrutiny. One doesn’t receive kid glove treatment when exposing the machinations of the ruling class.
He provides several examples of the expensive and much heralded high tech weapons and drones murdering innocent civilians. Even when the evidence is irrefutable, generals and others in the Defense Dept. simply choose to deny the obvious, they plug their ears and cover their eyes and issue mealy-mouthed apologies and explanations for the carnage inflicted by the overpriced killing machines.
The erections these officials maintain over their high tech gadgets rage on despite the consistent failures of the youngsters – many in their early 20s sitting in air-conditioned strip mall settings thousands of miles away – in distinguishing on their computer screens a Taliban fighter or Iraqi insurgent. Innocent citizens taking a nature walk or kids playing futbol in a field are seemingly fair game to the creamy cheeked laptop bombardiers sitting halfway around the world, some having just returned from lunch at the mall food court.
Often the distant computer pilots choose to see what they want to see on their screens and little else. This isn’t an in depth creative process since the screens view the action as if looking through a soda straw with a focus that would be considered legally blind for driving. No matter, sheep herders, wedding parties, birthday bashes can all become fair game. Cockburn documents how battles that are cluster fudges to begin with turn into even bigger cluster fudges simply because commanders choose to coordinate the attacks and manage soldiers and planes from hundreds of miles away, safely ensconced behind a screen far from the bloody fighting.
The finest portion of ‘Kill Chain’ is met with a sort of disclaimer right off the bat from Cockburn. He’s savvy enough to refrain from reporting the full name of a genuine psychopath who works for the CIA who goes by the name of “Mike.” Mike’s a weird and reclusive sadistic sociopath. Cockburn addresses the fact that the Justice Dept. has a penchant for prosecuting journalists; hence Cockburn feels it prudent to keep Mike’s identity confidential. Mike’s a coward who has the bloodthirsty need to drone strike almost everything in sight; he just can’t function without having his finger hovering near a button to launch a strike. He gets his kicks by sitting thousands of miles away yet launching bombs at the drop of a hat. He’s connected to Washington politicians who also have pleasant dreams at night over bloodbaths in faraway lands; they protect Mike and allow his killing operation to roll on unfettered. Mike doesn’t care that war is a racket.
Regardless of how well any of these high-tech boondoggles perform, it’s ultimately a pointless Sisyphean exercise as the enemy quickly replenishes itself with younger more committed fighters. Speaking of boondoggles, among some others, Northrop Grumman is singled out in Cockburn's marvelous book for selling a real dumpster fire to the U.S. taxpayers, a drone by the name of ‘Global Hawk.'
All this misguided faith in high-tech weaponry, technological gadgets and gizmos reminds one of Howard Kunstler’s magnificent book ‘Too Much Magic.’ In a way ‘Kill Chain’ and Kunstler’s work make for a satisfying two volume set on how the violent failures of drones and the absurd wizardry of distant drone computer screens point out a sickness that permeates a certain segment of United States society.
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