For years, the United States has danced around the fact that it has repeatedly enter the sovereign territory of other countries with drone attacks and in some cases small unit attacks without the permission of countries like Pakistan. Such acts violate international law and would be viewed by the United States as an act of war if committed on U.S. territory. This week,Defense Secretary Leon Panetta finally responded directly to those objections and said that the attacks would continue unabated. Panetta essentially stated that we can invade other nations because we can and that countries will have to come to accept that — using the same concept as “floggings will continue on ship until morale improves.”
Panetta insisted this is really not them (other countries) but us. Speaking in India, he proclaimed “This is about our sovereignty as well.” As for Pakistan, which has repeatedly objected to attacks on its territory, Panetta said “It’s a complicated relationship, often times frustrating, often times difficult. They have provided some cooperation. There are other times when frankly that cooperation is not there.” Strangely, we would not view the relationship as complicated if Mexico sent drones into Texas to take out suspects or landed Mexican special forces in Arizona to kill enemies. We would treat it as a matter of war.
Panetta has finally made “American exceptionalism” official policy. We do these things simply because we can; because we are the United States. From torture to military tribunals to hit lists, the United States is above the legal standards that we impose on others. The greatest danger is that our hypocrisy abroad is turning into hypocrisy at home where we continue to claim to be the “land of the free” while stripping citizens of basic rights and expanding unchecked presidential and police powers.
Obama has expanded drone attacks to an unprecedented level while expanding his claimed authority to kill citizens without a charge or trial. Now the most common image of the United States abroad is not our Constitution but our drones. For many people around the world, Panetta’s speech will be viewed as adding unrestained arrogance to unrestrained power.
Source: ABC
U.S. again bombs mourners
The Obama policy of attacking rescuers and grieving rituals continues this weekend in Pakistan
BY GLENN GREENWALD
June 4, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/04/obama_again_bombs_mourners/singleton/
Excerpt:
In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: “the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.” As The New York Times summarized those findings: “at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile” while “the bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals.”
This repellent practice continues. Over the last three days, the U.S. has launched three separate drone strikes in Pakistan: one on each day. As The Guardian reports, the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 people in these strikes, the last of which, early this morning, killed between 8 and 15. It was the second strike, on Sunday, that targeted mourners gathered to grieve those killed in the first strike:
At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.
Note that there is no suggestion, even from the “officials” on which these media reports (as usual) rely, that the dead man was a Terrorist or even a “militant.” He was simply receiving condolences for his dead brother. But pursuant to the standards embraced by President Obama, the brother — without knowing anything about him — is inherently deemed a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target for death solely by virtue of being a “military-age male in a strike zone.” Of course, killing family members of bombing targets is nothing new for this President: let’s recall the still-unresolved question of why Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen two weeks after his father was killed.
I ask this sincerely: what kind of country targets rescuers, funeral attendees, and people gathered to mourn? If a Hollywood film featured a villainous King ordering lethal attacks on rescuers, funerals and mourners — those medically attending to or grieving his initial victims — any decent audience member would, by design, seethe with contempt for such an inhumane tyrant. But this is the standard policy and practice under President Obama and it continues through today. Recall the outrage that was sparked when WikiLeaks released its Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter during the Bush era firing on unarmed rescuers, who had arrived to retrieve the initial victims who had been shot and were laying wounded on the ground. That tactic continues under President Obama, although it is now expanded to include the targeting of grieving rituals.
Mespo:
A little airport security in the United States can certainly thwart the occasional plane hijacking. Refusing to train airline hijacker-pilots at American flight simulator schools can help, too, as can planeloads of American passengers refusing to allow four unarmed men to take over their aircraft. Common sense behavior like that can reduce — but never entirely eliminate — the risk of another airline hijacking. But what connection any of this has with America bombing impoverished villagers in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan neither you, nor anyone else, has adequately demonstrated. Because you can’t.
The world — and even America (mostly) — knows that America has gotten its ass handed to it again by a bunch of barely armed Afghan poppy farmers, criminal drug lords, and corrupt quisling puppets — far less formidable foes than the NVA and NLF in Vietnam. The dreary body counts and pointless free-fire-zone bombings have only one cosmetic purpose, just as they had when I served in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent forty years ago. As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich explains:
Again, with the Iraq and Afhan “wars” already lost, the killing of Afghans and Pakistanis has no purpose other than making Americans feel all-patriotic-and-stuff about their SACRED SYMBOL SOLDIER and COMMANDER-IN-BRIEF while our corporate/mercenary “military” scuttles out of an untenable trap in hopes of not losing its lucrative funding due to complete failure to obtain anything of national value from its decades of bloody bungling abroad. I remember how uncounted numbers of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians perished for this same ignoble and cowardly saving of American face (for Americans). Countless Iraqis have suffered for the same indefensible reasons. I want no part of seeing innocent foreigners die to save the faces — i.e, the exposed political genitals — of another American political/military cohort that belongs on the slag heap of history.
Once more, we lost the day we started and we win the day we stop. Killing more impoverished Muslims for a few more years, just so our President and Generals can pretend that they have some purpose in life, won’t alter the truth of our defeat. It will only make us look more venal and vicious for allowing our “leaders” to think that they have any face left to lose.
mespo,
“I also think affording Western notions of morality to peoples without the slightest inclination to adopt or abide by them is foolishness of the highest order.”
What are our Western notions of morality that are so far superior to the notions of morality held by those who do not share ours if we are willing to kill innocent children, women, and men in order to protect ourselves from those who are willing to kill innocent people? Approximately 3,000 people were killed on 9/11. How many members of the American military and people who lived in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen have died in order to protect us from another terrorist attack?
mespo,
The U.S. bought the southwestern part of the United states at the point of a gun. Think we can’t do it again? Mexico was thinking about being allied with Germany during WWII. Then they thought again. Good choice.
Mike A:
I’d agree with you about criminal conspiracies if the hosting nations would agree to cooperate. We’re talking about when they don’t or won’t. What is your position on that?
In that regard, what is your position on the President Wilson’s decision to send Black Jack Pershing across the Mexican border without permission to capture Pancho Villa in 1916 in response to the Columbus , New Mexico raid?
And what Mike A. said.
And to think all of this hassle originated with domestic traitors and war criminals refusing to attack the parties that actually attack us on 9/11 because they were in business with them. Who’d have thunk such a thing would lead to more chaos and potential disaster? Aside from anyone paying attention that is.
mespo:
I understand your position, but we disagree fundamentally. Terrorist organizations should be treated as criminal conspiracies and handled as police matters. In addition, I do not believe that the moral principles upon which law is based are determined with reference to the actions of our enemies. Were that the case, belief in the rule of law would have no meaning. Machiavelli is to political theory what Randianism is to economic theory: anarchy with a cheap mask.
“As CNN pundit Fareed Zacharia finally got around to noticing recently, Americans “look like a bunch of scared frightened losers.” That about covers it.” Michael Murry
—————————————
what a delightfully pubescent response to a globally destructive precipace…..
do you know of anyone who is sane and not scared???? I would sincerely recommend avoiding them and NOT giving them
a) car keys
b) power
c) cute fuzzy balls of fur….
anonymously:
“Who decides if an American citizen is a traitor?
***********************
Do you contend that the person who said this was not a traitor:
“In many of al-Awlaki’s videos, he called on Muslims around the world to kill Americans. In a video released on November 8, 2010, titled “Make it known and clear to mankind,” al-Awlaki said, “Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans, fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers seeking divine guidance,” he said.
Al-Awlaki also warns of future attacks against American interests both in the U.S. and abroad. In a video interview released in its entirety on May 23, 2010, he said, “Oh America, if you attack us, we will attack you, and if you kill us, we will kill you… These American soldiers heading to Afghanistan and Iraq will be killed. We will kill them if we can, there in Fort Hood, or we will kill them in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
In another video released on March 17, 2010, al-Awlaki spoke about the duty incumbent on all Muslims to fight against the U.S. and proclaimed that “jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.” Al-Awlaki further threatened that “America cannot and will not win… there is no rolling back of the worldwide jihad movement.”
(…)
“All Western interests, according to al-Awlaki, are therefore permissible targets. “This would make the attacking of any Western target legal from an Islamic viewpoint,” al-Awlaki argues. “Assassinations, bombings, and acts of arson are all legitimate forms of revenge against a system that relishes the sacrilege of Islam in the name of freedom.”
~Anti-Defamation League-Nov. 2011
mespo727272
1, June 7, 2012 at 8:01 pm
anonymously:
“American citizens have been killed and continue to be targeted. And as I understand it, there’s nothing to prevent a strike on American soil.”
*************************
Tell me who has been targeted besides Anwar al-Awlaki the radical cleric who led external operations of al-Quaeda on the Arab Penisula and who advocated violent jihad against Americans and who ultimately played “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans, ” according to the Chmn of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If you want to argue the morality of that strike, I’m all ears. Traitors give up citizenship by their act of treason.
****************
****************
Who decides if an American citizen is a traitor? Was al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old, American-born son a traitor? (He, too, was killed by a drone strike, as you probably know, as was his 17-year-old cousin.)
Gene H:
I’m with you that drone strikes are not an initial response but the ultimate response except when the stakes are high. What do we do when the sovereign host state ignores us? As to acting when the stakes are high: Do we really believe that if we asked Pakistan for help in capturing OBL while he was in that hideout in Abbottabad, that someone in that government wouldn’t have tipped him off?
mespo,
“Do I have to take Somalia as I find it? Or Yemen? or Afghanistan? Can’t I destroy the criminals they harbor without destabilizing the “state”? Isn’t that exactly what surgical drone strikes do?”
You most certainly do have to take them as you find them in situations where the state is not cooperative and/or hostile as well. Unless you are willing to pay the price of perpetually ignoring sovereignty by going to war when that state has decided they’ve simply had enough. The way to avoid getting bitten by a bear is not to poke it repeatedly. There are other ways to encourage cooperation in tracking down criminals, but doing things this way simply encourages either war or state sponsored terrorism (which should rightfully lead to war) in response – especially given that drones indiscriminately kill civilians as well as terrorists. That’s hardly a way to win the hearts and minds of a people.
methinks the . . . doth protest too much . . . .
bfm:
You raise an interesting point and one that I agree with. Linking morality with foreign policy doesn’t work and justification is hard to come by without resort to international law. Efficacy, on the third hand, is a valuable test. Like I asked Mike A: Can’t we agree that drone strikes against our enemies makes an attack against us less likely? At least in the short run?
anonymously:
“American citizens have been killed and continue to be targeted. And as I understand it, there’s nothing to prevent a strike on American soil.”
*************************
Tell me who has been targeted besides Anwar al-Awlaki the radical cleric who led external operations of al-Quaeda on the Arab Penisula and who advocated violent jihad against Americans and who ultimately played “the lead role in planning and directing the efforts to murder innocent Americans, ” according to the Chmn of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If you want to argue the morality of that strike, I’m all ears. Traitors give up citizenship by their act of treason.
Jill:
“We were attacked after 9/11, by someone in this govt.,”
*************************
We were attacked by Bruce Ivins who worked for the government but there is no proof he was aided or abetted by our government. Sirhan Sirhan worked as a stable boy at the Santa Anita Racetrack. Did the Santa Anita Racetrack attack Bobby Kennedy?
anonymously:
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin”
********************
“Everyone agrees with that, No one I see here is arguing for more restrictions on the rights of US citizens. We’re arguing foreign policy and the effect of our sense of morality thereon. Drone strikes against our enemies across “sovereign” borders is the topic.” mespo727272
American citizens have been killed and continue to be targeted. And as I understand it, there’s nothing to prevent a strike on American soil.
Gene H:
Do I have to take Somalia as I find it? Or Yemen? or Afghanistan? Can’t I destroy the criminals they harbor without destabilizing the “state”? Isn’t that exactly what surgical drone strikes do? Do we disagree with Queen Victoria that a state is what borders it can defend ?
Bob,Esq:
Keep talking Bob, Esq., I enjoy your clown show. An attempt to negate an argument (cross border drone strikes aren’t immoral) by pointing out a characteristic of the speaker (” I simply called you intellectually dishonest and a liar”) is an ad hominem attack in most worlds. What does Kant tell us since you’re unlikely to tell us much without reference to him? Thinking for yourself seems too difficult a chore. I’m anxiously awaiting yet another venomous reply from the 18th Century.