We have gone from carpet-bombing to targeting targets so precisely that a bomb doesn't throw a brick into the street. So now we are war criminals for assassinating an individual instead of leveling an entire city. There's no winning with these people.
On the other hand, after howling at the moon at a Bush plan that never got off the ground, the left is oddly silent on Obama's methods. http://rawstory.com/2009/10/mayer-drone-attacks-on-pakistan/ drone-murdered Pakistanis -- these human beings, these fathers and mothers, these grandparents, these toddlers, these brothers and sisters -- their lives are just statistics to be coldly weighed in the calibrations of imperial policy. The "bad news" about their deaths is not that they were murdered, not that these utterly defenseless men, women and children were blown to shreds without warning, without the slightest chance of escape, by flying robots controlled by unseen hands a world away; no, the "bad news" is that these that these killing might possibly hamper America The only standards are double standards. Pentagon Manhunters: America's New Murder, Inc.? 11-21-2009 By Tom Burghardt - BLN Contributing Writer When CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed that for eight years the Agency ran a secret program to hunt down and kill top leaders of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al-Qaeda, it set off a political firestorm. While congressional Democrats and Republicans diverted the public's attention with claims and counterclaims whether or not the Company had "misled" Congress by not disclosing the program's existence, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported months earlier that former Vice President Richard Cheney had stood up an "executive assassination ring." According to Hersh, that fully-operational program was run, not by the CIA, but by the Pentagon's secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a subunit attached to United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). During a "Great Conversations" event last March at the University of Minnesota, Hersh told the audience: "Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. "Under President Bush’s authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us." (Eric Black, "Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring'," MinnPost.com, March 11, 2009) Old news right? Well, not entirely. Wired investigative reporter Noah Shachtman revealed November 3, that a report published by the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), the "educational component" of USSOCOM based at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, proposed creating a specialized "manhunting" unit with a global reach. (snips) This "high-level executive approval" of an international death squad reflected past--and current--Pentagon thinking that when it comes to killing capitalism's opponents, everything is permitted. The parallels to contemporary American covert intelligence and military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with their documented linkages to the flourishing international drug trade are striking. That these moves by Washington to seize the geostrategic high ground vis-à-vis their imperialist rivals, as in Latin America decades earlier, have spawned an unholy alliance with far-right political forces, warlords, religious extremists and drug traffickers, exposes the lie that U.S. military intervention has anything to do with democracy and human rights. Thirty years ago Danish journalist Henrik Krüger observed: International Fascista was a crucial first step toward fulfilling the dream not only of [SS Col. Otto] Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid exile, José Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and Prince Justo Valerio Borghese, the Italian Fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton. They, and other Nazi and Fascist powers throughout Europe and Latin America, envisioned a new world order built on a Fascist Iron Circle linking Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, La Paz, Brasilia and Montevideo. (Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism, Boston: South End Press, 1980, p. 210) (snips) Lest readers forget, New Scotland Yard's Antiterrorist Branch, SO13, was the "crack" unit that murdered Jean Claude de Menezes in cold blood on a London subway in 2005. After an investigation that was little more than a cover-up, it was revealed that de Menezes was entirely innocent and had been mistakenly targeted by SO13's armed wing, SO19, as part of "Operation Kratos," the Met's controversial "shoot-to-kill" program meant to take down suspected terrorists and would-be suicide bombers. De Menezes was neither, but that didn't stop police from pumping seven bullets into his head. Tellingly, SO13 was stood up after consultations with Israeli "experts," well-known for their fidelity to human rights, the rule of law and the sanctity of life, (snips) secrecy and deceit are the norm and discretion in choosing a "target" is transformed into a morality play with a unique demonstration effect: If internal security forces arrest a terrorist, it is an act of law enforcement, most often viewed favorably by both the international and domestic communities. If a terrorist is killed in an alley by an unknown assailant, it is an unsolved crime, a crime which may not be deeply investigated if the terrorist has a lengthy rap sheet. Thus it may be preferable to consign terrorist manhunting to intelligence and law enforcement organs and to avoid entanglements caused by crossing manhunting with military or diplomatic functions. Where manhunting is concerned, there may be legal and moral advantage in ambiguity and plausible denial. (Crawford, op. cit., p. 16) Harken back to Seymour Hersh's description of how Dick Cheney's "executive assassination ring" actually performed in the real world: "they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving." This too, was the precise mechanism employed by Operation Condor assassins across Latin America, Europe and the United States during the 1970s. Small teams of highly-trained, plausibly deniable intelligence officers and assets, including NATO-trained Italian neofascists, Turkish narcotraffickers and CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles carried out a reign of terror against their Southern Cone leftist opponents. While the 1976 car-bombing in Washington, D.C. that murdered former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his secretary, Ronni Moffitt, may be the most notorious Condor operation to come to light, dozens if not hundreds of other "catch and snatch" operations were carried out, with a wink-and-a-nod from Washington. Those "disappeared" into Argentine or Chilean dungeons were never to be seen again. (snips) dirty work.... Crawford's manhunting weltanschauung is not conducive to a democratic model of society but rather, to the darkness of a technocratic and immutable fascism servicing America's ruling oligarchy. " UNQUOTES for educational review [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ - please ASK FRIENDS TO subscribe- anyone sends a blank message to: [email protected] or ask Listowner: Harold Helm <[email protected]> TX USA phone 713-529-2333Yahoo! 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