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Showing posts from May 24, 2015

Death from Above

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It’s not often that a book review coincides with current events. Books, particularly nonfiction, are usually written and published months, if not years after an event has occurred. That’s because good nonfiction is written in retrospect: writers have spent some time absorbing their subject, researching and analyzing the facts; authors are hesitant to be rash in judgment or thought. However, there are exceptions. Some pieces of nonfiction, particularly journalists’ works, are appropriate now — not later. Andrew Cockburn’s new book,  Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins , is one of them.  Cockburn’s book is timely.  In just the past few weeks there has been a flood of  reporting from media outlets  stating  that a drone strike killed an American and an Italian hostage when targeting a group of Al-Qaeda members operating near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, questions about drone strikes, the debate about targeted killing, and the transparency of the drone progra