The Iraq air war that you never hear about

michael schwartz is right... we hear nothing about it...

One of the true scandals of media coverage of the war in Iraq has been the simple fact that you -- relatively small numbers of you anyway -- had to visit Tomdispatch.com, or Juan Cole's invaluable Informed Comment blog, or Antiwar.com, or other Internet sites to find out anything about the fierce (if limited) ongoing air war in that country. [...] Our military has regularly loosed its planes in "targeted" attacks on guerrillas in Iraq's heavily populated urban areas (where much of the fighting has taken place), sometimes, as in largely Shiite Najaf and largely Sunni Falluja in 2004, destroying whole sections of major cities, in part from the air. Despite this, American reporters in Iraq have essentially refused to look up, or even to acknowledge the planes, predator drones, and low-flying helicopters passing daily overhead.

[...]

As far as I can tell, no American reporters have been assigned to, or written about, the part of the American air campaign that has been mounted from outside Iraq -- from air bases in places like the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, or from aircraft carriers; and hardly more has been written from the United States where our fleet of unmanned but deadly Predator drones are (remotely) controlled.

i must have missed the story last september about remotely controlled predator drones... that's a pretty interesting piece of news and i was moved to go check it out...

The Predator has emerged as one of the most useful weapons in the U.S. military's arsenal. The tiny Unmanned Aerial Vehicle played a role in catching Saddam Hussein, in killing a high-profile al Qaeda suspect in Pakistan this spring, and in trying to find the Navy SEAL team that went missing in Afghanistan this summer. But the pilots who actually fly the Predator are far from the action. They're sprawled in leather armchairs planted in trailers, in the middle of the desert in Nevada.

i am embarrassed to say that this was my first visit to tomdispatch... it won't be my last...

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