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Meanwhile, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar yesterday patiently explained that drone strikes — which Americans widely support, including American liberals — are “completely illegal and unlawful” and “counterproductive” because they “fuel terrorism,” since people tend to become quite angry at the foreign power which slaughters their children…

So let me get this straight. A few years after some terrorists used our airliners as bombs in attacks on otherwise unreachable American targets—and that plot was unrepeatable thanks to subsequent passenger awareness—we become pioneers in the business of cheap, remote controlled flying bombers that can go anywhere. We create a thriving market for their components and accelerate the development of these objectively evil machines by many years. And just in case anybody had qualms about using drones against American civilians, we accidentally kill hundreds of civilians with drones over several years, in countries where we are not at war.

If you craved a near-term future of asymmetrical drone warfare encircling the globe and inevitably reaching within our borders, you would do exactly what the old men in charge of our war machine are doing.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

The Bureau’s journalists and researchers spent months engaged in the painstaking and difficult task of gathering documentation on the effects of the top secret U.S. drone program in Waziristan — producing extraordinary findings — only to find themselves and their sources, many of whom are local villagers whose children have been killed, depicted as Al Qaeda’s witting or unwitting allies the very next day in The New York Times, by some senior government official too frightened to put his name on his accusations and aided (as always) by a newspaper that has repeatedly vowed to stop these practices.