Obama's Finest Hour: Killing Innocent People For "Made-Up Crap"
Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 18 October 2010 17:03
If ever I am tempted by the siren songs of my
tribal past as a deep-fried, yellow-dawg Democrat, and begin to feel any
faint, atavistic stirrings of sympathy for the old gang, I simply think
of things like the scenario below, sketched last week by Johann Hari, and
those wispy ghosts of partisanship past go howling back to the depths:
Imagine if, an hour from now, a
robot-plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane
has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away,
sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses
in your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours until
there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse
to comment. They don't even admit the robot-planes belong to them. But
they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you
was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them.
Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot.
Now imagine it doesn't end there: these attacks
are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up
funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot-planes in
the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named
"Predators", or "Reapers" – after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much
you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful
civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop. What do you do? If
there was a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved
to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?
...[This] is in fact an accurate description of
life in much of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators
and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the support of
other Western governments, and they killed more than 700 civilians in
2009 alone – 14 times the number killed in the 7/7 attacks in London.
The floods were seen as an opportunity to increase the attacks, and last
month saw the largest number of robot-plane bombings ever: 22. Over the
next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700 per cent.
Friends, it's very simple: if you support Barack Obama and the Democrats
-- even if reluctantly, even if you're just being all sophisticatedly
super-savvy and blogospherically strategic about it, playing the "long
game" or eleven-dimensional chess or what have you -- you are supporting
the outright murder of innocent people who have never done anything
against you or yours. You have walked into a house, battered down the
bedroom door, put the barrel of a gun against the temple of a sleeping
child, and pulled the trigger. That is what you are supporting, that is
what you are complicit in, that is what you yourself are doing.
But hey, let's be all super-savvy and eleventh-dimensional ourselves
here for a moment. Let's be pragmatic, and technocratic, let's be
grown-ups, let's not get sidetracked by a bunch of jejune, dorm-room,
hippy-dippy moralizing. No, let's concentrate on practicalities, let's
get down to brass tacks, let's be serious and focus on "what
works" to protect our national security. OK, so here's the practical
result of the illegal campaign of mass murder that Obama is waging on
the sovereign territory of one of America's allies:
... Drone technology was developed by
the Israelis, who routinely use it to bomb the Gaza Strip. I've been in
Gaza during some of these attacks. The people there were terrified – and
radicalised. A young woman I know who had been averse to political
violence and an advocate of peaceful protest saw a drone blow up a car
full of people – and she started supporting Islamic Jihad and crying for
the worst possible revenge against Israel. Robot-drones have
successfully bombed much of Gaza, from secular Fatah to Islamist Hamas,
to the brink of jihad.
Is the same thing happening in Pakistan? David
Kilcullen is a counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus
in Iraq and now advises the State Department. He has shown that two per
cent of the people killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis.
The remaining 98 per cent are as innocent as the victims of 9/11. He
says: "It's not moral." And it gets worse: "Every one of these dead
non-combatants represents an alienated family, and more recruits for a
militant movement that has grown exponentially as drone strikes have
increased. ... It could be poised to get even worse: Bob Woodward's
Obama's Wars says the US has an immediate plan to bomb 150 targets in
Pakistan if there is a jihadi attack inside America.
Why, it's almost as if the drone campaign was designed to
create more and more enemies -- and more and more contracts for war
profiteers to build more and more drones, which can then be used to
create more and more enemies, which means more and more contracts for
.... say, it is a practical plan, after all! A practical plan to create
terrorism, not quell it.
And what is the "evidence" used by the Administration militarists as
they draw up their target lists for the defenseless villages in
Pakistan? What is the "intelligence" produced by the $75 billion lavished on
our 200,000 security apparatchiks every year? On what basis is Barack Obama
killing people in Pakistan? Hari reports:
..[The] press releases uncritically
repeated by the press after a bombing always brag about "senior
al-Qa'ida commanders" killed – but some people within the CIA admit how
arbitrary their choice of targets is. One of their senior figures told
The New Yorker: "Sometimes you're dealing with tribal chiefs. Often they
say an enemy of theirs is al-Qa'ida because they want to get rid of
somebody, or they made crap up because they wanted to prove they were
valuable so they could make money."
That's right: Barack Obama is killing hundreds of innocent civilians in
Pakistan on the basis of crap made up for money.
Made-up crap. For money. That's why a child who is just as precious as
your child is to a parent who is just as real a person as you are was
killed this week, by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party and the
entire bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States of
America: crap made up for money.
And of course, it's not just tribal chiefs making up crap for blood
money: the entire aforementioned bipartisan foreign policy establishment
is now and has for years been making up crap "so they could make money"
-- for themselves, for their corporate patrons, for their government
agencies, for their defense and "security" stockholdings, for the
perpetuation of their bloated, belligerent, pig-ignorant domination of
world affairs and American society -- by killing innocent people all
over the world.
"But oh my gosh, oh my lord, we have to support Obama! What if those
Tea Party Republicans get into power? What would happen then?" What
would happen? The same goddamned thing that's happening right now,
that's what. More and more war, more and more murder, more and more
domination by a militarist kleptocracy. As Glenn Greenwald notes this week,
Obama and the Tea Partiers (and the neocons, and the liberal hawks, and
the Bush Regime war criminals) are in lockstep (even goosestep) on
keeping the War Machine stoked and rolling.
That's why the opposition to the Tea Party Republicans has been so
anemic, focused almost entirely on personality flaws or asinine comments
or resume padding or stupid things they did in college. The Democrats
can't possibly attack them on substance -- i.e., the fact that
the Tea Partiers are rabid warmongers who delight in murder, torture and
repression and believe that the poor, the sick, the old, the weak, the
unlucky, and the vulnerable should just eat shit and die already --
because these are the same positions the Democrats hold! Who
"reformed" health care into a gargantuan, guaranteed boondoggle for
rapacious conglomerates? Who bailed out the bankers and left millions in
the hands of savage "robo-signers?" Who set up the "Catfood Commission"
and stocked it from top to bottom with long-time, deep-dyed haters of
the poor and the weak? It wasn't Dick Cheney, bub.
I don't want to see the Tea Partiers in power. But I'm not going to
support one faction of murderers and plunderers just to keep out another
faction of murderers and plunderers. Hari makes this good analogy about
the drone program:
Yet many people defend the drones by
saying: "We have to do something." If your friend suffered terrible
third-degree burns, would you urge her to set fire to her hair because
"you have to do something"? Would you give a poisoning victim another,
worse poison, on the grounds that any action is better than none?
Similarly, I say: would you support one murderer -- who likes to break
into children's bedrooms and blow their brains out -- in order to stop
another murderer, who would do the same thing, from taking over a
vicious gang of murderers? What would be the basis, the reason for your
support? That the first murderer wears nicer suits? Digs cooler music?
Throws better street parties? Leaves a pretty little flower next to the
blown-out brains?
For a system sunk so deeply in evil, there is no "lesser" evil to choose. The
militarist kleptocracy itself is evil,
and every political faction that does not denounce it and seek to
dismantle it is complicit in this evil. The choice is to stand outside such
factions; the choice is non-cooperation with evil, as advocated by
Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King. I'm not going to spend my brief time
here on earth standing with blood-soaked killers, no matter what
factional name they give themselves, or what loyalties they might claim
on our myth-clouded memories of the past. I'm not going to teach my
children that all we can do is to grovel before one child-murdering
maniac or another, to keep quiet, to never speak the truth, to sell
their votes, their dignity and their souls to murderers who would
pervert every good instinct -- and every bad instinct -- every worthy
hope and every nasty fear, to keep themselves in power.
Dead children. Made-up crap. For money. That's what our leading "dissidents"
want us to support. There is much that could be said about the utterly puerile
arguments
being offered for this murder-abetting stance; but in the interests of
brevity, and civility -- and my own sanity -- I will forbear, and simply
say: no thanks.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2035-obamas-finest-hour-killing-innocent-people-for-qmade-up-crapq.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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