ARCHIVE

More TV and radio stations in U.S.; NPR's audience grows older; 15 percent of Americans don't use internet; Tech companies against Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act; U.S. government to register radio-controlled drones. Then, a longer report and audio essay about radio-controlled drones. There is a new Edward Snowden, and this whistleblower is opening up about radio-controlled drones, and the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Jeremy Scahill writes in The Intercept that, "The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted more than 12 years ago, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes." Some of the revelations in The Intercept reporting includes that as many as 90 percent of U.S. drone killings in one five month period weren’t the intended targets, that a former British citizen was killed in a radio-controlled drone strike despite repeated opportunities to capture him instead, and details of the grisly process by which the American government chooses who will die. The whistleblower is so far anonymous, but gave The Intercept a statement for release: “This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong. We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.” The stories in The Intercept, and the Congressional testimony from those in drone zones such as Pakistan, are chilling. Let's listen to a collage of sounds and stories from the drone wars. Includes "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" by The Gap Band, "It Came Out of the Sky" from Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Drones Over Brooklyn" by El-P, and "Bullet the Blue Sky" by U2. The show also includes clips from Congressional testimony on C-Span from Yemeni villagers bombed by American drones, John Oliver's HBO show, NBC News, and an interview with an American drone pilot.