Our picksFlying Ginsu weapon; targeting the Islamic State; anti-immigrant fervor, and more
· “Flying Ginsu” missile won’t resolve U.S. targeted killing controversy
· The morning after Maduro in Venezuela
· Targeting the Islamic State, or why the military should invest in artificial intelligence
· How anti-immigrant fervor built in the early twentieth century
· Appeals court rules Trump end of DACA was unlawful
· Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign is being boosted by Putin apologists
· The U.S. system for “skilled” migrants is broken
· What we learned investigating a network of Islamophobic Facebook pages
· Watch what happens when vaccinations drop by 10%
· Venezuela’s collapse is the worst outside of war in decades, economists say
“Flying Ginsu” missile won’t resolve U.S. targeted killing controversy (Letta Tayler, Just Security)
Last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed a noteworthy development in the U.S. targeted killing program: a modified Hellfire missile that strikes without exploding, reportedly leaving those close to the target unscathed. The CIA and the U.S. military have used the hitherto secret weapon at least a half-dozen times in recent years to kill terrorism suspects in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, the Journal reported.
Proponents tout the missile, called the R9X, as a game-changer that can spare more civilian lives than traditional Hellfires. But the new technology can only be as good as the intelligence and the rules that guide it. On its own, the R9X won’t resolve the host of legal issues surrounding the U.S. targeted killing program, which since 2002 has killed thousands of people with scant transparency. Key issues include the definition of a lawful target, the question of which body of international law applies in targeted killings, and the vast disparities between governmental and non-governmental estimates of civilian casualties.
The morning after Maduro in Venezuela (Fabiana Sofia Perera, War on the Rocks)
One day Venezuelans will wake up to the news that the Maduro regime has ended. Though it is impossible to know when that day might be (political markets site PredictIt puts the odds somewhere around 2 to 1 that Nicolás Maduro won’t be in power by the end of 2019), as a popular Venezuelan song by Carlos Baute says, “no hay mal que dure mil años” (“nothing bad lasts one thousand years”). (Cont.)
