Win Without War helps you tell Congress to ban secret CIA drone strikes. You no doubt know that our last two Presidents have conducted multitudinous drone strikes in foreign lands upon which Congress has not declared war, killing American citizens and foreign civilians; you may also remember that President Obama authorized the CIA to conduct the strikes in order to avoid violating the letter of the Geneva Convention. Then, just last month, our current President reversed Mr. Obama's 2016 executive order requiring the public disclosure of drone strikes, so now we now have to work a lot harder to figure out what our government's doing, which is kind of the opposite of transparency, so we might as well stop the drone strikes entirely It's no use telling me that disclosure "hamstrings" our President, because hamstringing our President from conducting war without Congressional authorization is a feature of our Constitution, not a bug.
Meanwhile, in a related note, our Defense Department lately exempted some 5,000 pages of documentation describing Google's work on a government drone project (known as Project Maven) from the Freedom of Information Act, on the rather suspicious grounds that their work comprises "critical infrastructure security information." Civilized people know that it's too easy to go around justifying any proposal by screaming that we're all going to die if we don't adopt it; thus civilized people set boundaries that respect both a project's requirement for secrecy and the people's right to transparency. And Project Maven uses AI to pilot and target drones, so we have every right to know whether Google's AI is any less sucky than anyone else's or how many false positives it's had in testing, at the very least. Hence Demand Progress helps you tell our Department of Defense to stop blocking FOIA requests about Project Maven.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject our President's hateful, hurtful, stupid budget, then Moms Rising still helps you do that. You know the basic gist of this budget: slash spending that actually helps good Americans (including Medicare spending, no matter how much our President denies it), but ratchet up fraud-and-waste-drenched defense spending, in a nation that already spends more on defense than the next eight nations on that list combined. Now, you also know that even Republican-dominated budgets haven't hewed to this line, not even during those two recent years of total Republican control of our federal government. But surely you know why that is: because we the people have demanded it, and a truly draconian budget existing only to please the politicians' big donors would result in mass defeats of Congressfolk all over America. So you know we need to keep the pressure on them to do our will.
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