Airborne terror

Tom Engelhardt reminds us, again, that American terrorism comes most often via bombs dropped from the sky, an obvious truism if there ever was one. Nevertheless, a truism that Americans go to extraordinary lengths to obscure.

"We in the U.S. recognize butchery when we see it -- the atrocity of the car bomb, the chlorine-gas truck bomb, the beheading," Engelhardt offers. "These acts are obviously barbaric in nature. But our favored way of war -- war from a distance -- has, for us, been pre-cleansed of barbarism. Or rather its essential barbarism has been turned into a set of 'errant incidents,' of 'accidents,' of 'mistakes' repeatedly made over more than six decades."