-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
In a 2007 report, entitled Underlying Reasons for Success and Failure of Terrorist Attacks (pdf) and prepared for Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate by Homeland Security Institute (and recently scrubbed from their web site, here) notes: “a favorite tactic of Hamas, the “double tap;” a device is set off, and when police and other first responders arrive, a second, larger device is set off to inflict more casualties and spread panic.”
It has been documented that this terrorist tactic has been embraced by President Obama.
Obama has adopted the “double tap” tactic by using second drone attacks to kill the first responders to the first drone attacks. Funerals for the victims of the first drone attack have also been the target of second drone attacks. These second attacks have caused the deaths of between 282 and 535 civilians, and at least 60 children.
In a comment that could have come out of the Bush/Cheney/Rove administration, a senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said:
Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.
This Obama administration official has committed the irrelevant conclusion (ignoratio elenchi) fallacy. The conclusion that there are those who would help Al Qaeda is not relevant to the question of accuracy of the documentation.
Obama’s “double tap” policy is nothing short of despicable. Obama has brought dishonor to America and to our founding principles. When America commits the same actions that we condemn when used by terrorists, we become terrorists. The liberals’ silence on this issue is shameful. If George W. Bush had adopted this tactic, the cries of protest would have been deafening.
We wanted change and we got it, from bad to worse.
H/T: Glenn Greenwald, Tom Engelhardt, Scott Shane, Juan Cole, Chris Bertram, Justin Elliott, Glenn Greenwald.
US FUNDS THE TALIBAN????
One of the most important issues today is the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan and the fact that US
Military Aid to Pakistan is being used to fund the Pakistani ISI which is in turn funding Taliban
and Al Quada fighters. While this has been reported sporadically in the media for whatever
reason political pundits on the left and right have effectively ignored this issue.
Joe Klein in an article for Time, August 9, 2010, p. 19, has written an article that every American
citizen should go to their library and read, he writes,
“The commanders are unanimous in their belief that the ISI is running the show….And so,
despite professions of alliance with the US by Pakistan’s then dictator Pervez Musharraf, a
decision was made to keep the Taliban alive. A spigot of untargeted military aid from the George
W. Bush Administration helped fund the effort. A commander of the vicious Haqqani Taliban
network tells Waldman that their funding comes from ‘the Americans–from them to the
Pakistani military, and then to us.’ Waldman reports that the commander receives from the
Pakistanis ‘a reward for killing foreign soldiers, usually $4000 to $5000 for each soldier killed'”.
American tax dollars if not directly, then indirectly are being used to fund the Taliban and put
a bounty on American boys and girls head… Makes one wonder why the establishment right
or left is not reporting on this? If the right is covering for
the mistakes of the Bush administration…why is the establishment left not reporting on this???
…this is the most important issue of the day…we will never win a war where if not directly then
indirectly the US is funding the opposition!!!!
woody voinche
SM: “Pledge to get tougher on Iran.” See, one of my pet theories is that Obama’s Mr. Tough guy stuff is to avoid being forced into a corner to have to bomb Iran. But that makes Obama into even more of a craven coward than many of his detractors would suggest. I think I’m just flailing around for ways to avoid the most obvious conclusion regarding O.
At some point those who are targeted by the drones will get the weaponry they need to bring the drones down. Since the drones are being used in the US to spy on farmers, we may need the weaponry here. The only drone strike/s so far seems to have been the Pentagon, and, in a different configuration, the twin towers. But if an other false flag is needed, they’re here and ready for action.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/romney-aide-to-haaretz-after-he-s-elected-iran-will-see-there-s-a-new-sheriff-in-town.premium-1.435280 Pledge to get tougher on Iran.
Pakistani civilian victims vent anger over US drones
By Orla Guerin
BBC News, Islamabad
11/3/11
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/15553761
How the Obama administration is making the US media its mouthpiece
Spoonfed national security scoops based on anonymous official leaks – did we learn nothing from Judith Miller’s WMD reporting?
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 June 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/08/obama-administration-making-us-media-its-mouthpiece
Excerpt:
Over the past several weeks in the US, there has been a series of high-profile media scoops exposing numerous details about President Obama’s covert foreign policy and counterterrorism actions, stories appearing primarily in The New York Times. Americans, for the first time, have been told about Obama’s personal role in compiling a secret “kill list”, which determines who will be targeted for death in Pakistan and Yemen; his ordering of sophisticated cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities; and operational details about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Each of these stories revealed information clearly in the public interest and sparked important debates. But the way in which they were reported – specifically, their overwhelming reliance on Obama’s own usually anonymous aides – raise longstanding and still troubling questions about the relationship between the establishment American media and the government over which it is supposed to serve as adversarial watchdog.
The Obama White House’s extreme fixation on secrecy is shaped by a bizarre paradox. One the one hand, the current administration has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers – government employees who leak classified information showing high-level official wrongdoing – than all previous administrations combined. Obama officials have also, as ACLU lawyers documented this week in the Guardian, resisted with unprecedented vigor any attempts to subject their conduct to judicial review or any form of public disclosure, by insisting to courts that these programs are so secretive that the US government cannot even confirm or deny their existence without damaging US national security.
But at the very same time that they invoke broad secrecy claims to shield their conduct from outside scrutiny, it is Obama officials themselves who have continuously and quite selectively leaked information about these same programs to the US media. Indeed, the high publicity-value New York Times scoops of the past two weeks about covert national security programs have come substantially from Obama aides themselves.
The Times’ “kill list” article was based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers [who] described Mr Obama’s” central role in choosing whom the CIA will kill. The paper’s scoop that Obama ordered cyber-attacks on Iran cited, among others, “American officials”, including “a senior administration official” who proudly touted the president’s hands-on role in all measures used to cripple Tehran’s nuclear research.
Meanwhile, the same White House that insists in court that it cannot confirm the existence of the CIA’s drone program spent this week anonymously boasting to US news outlets of the president’s latest drone kill in Pakistan. And government emails ordered disclosed by a federal court last month revealed that at the same time as they were refusing to disclose information about the Bin Laden raid on the grounds that it is classified, the Obama administration was secretly meeting with, and shuffling sensitive information to, Hollywood filmmakers, who are producing what is certain to be a stirring and reverent film about that raid, originally scheduled to be released just weeks before the November presidential election.
The tactic driving all of this is as obvious as it is disturbing. Each of these election year leaks depicts Obama as a tough, hands-on, unflinching commander-in-chief: ruthlessly slaying America’s enemies and keeping us all safe. They simultaneously portray him as a deep moral and intellectual leader, profoundly grappling with the “writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas”, as he decides in secret who will live and die and which countries will be targeted with American aggression.
In sum, these anonymous leaks are classic political propaganda: devoted to glorifying the leader and his policies for political gain. Because the programs are shrouded in official secrecy, it is impossible for journalists to verify these selective disclosures. By design, the only means the public has to learn anything about what the president is doing is the partial, selective disclosures by Obama’s own aides – those who work for him and are devoted to his political triumph.
But that process is a recipe for government deceit and propaganda. This was precisely the dynamic that, in the run-up to the attack on Iraq, co-opted America’s largest media outlets as mindless purveyors of false government claims. The defining journalistic sin of Judith Miller, the New York Times’ disgraced WMD reporter, was that she masqueraded the unverified assertions of anonymous Bush officials as reported fact. As the Times’ editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa, assertions from anonymous sources were “insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged”.
These recent Times scoops about Obama’s policies do not sink to the level of the Judy Miller debacle. For one thing, they contain some impressive reporting and even disturbing revelations about the conduct of Obama officials – most notably, that they manipulate casualty figures and hide civilian deaths from their drone attacks by “counting all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”.
Media, drones and rank propaganda
As usual, the leading spokespeople for government policies are disguised as the nation’s Adversarial Watchdog Press
BY GLENN GREENWALD
June 8, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/06/08/media_drones_and_rank_propaganda/singleton/
Excerpt:
Several items today relate to the issue of gross U.S. media propaganda and Obama’s national security policies:
(1) I have an Op-Ed in The Guardian today on how the American media has been repeatedly and willingly coopted in the Obama administration’s propagandistic abuse of its secrecy powers, with a focus on the recent high-profile, Obama-flattering national security scoops from The New York Times.
(2) In yesterday’s Guardian, the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer and Nathan Wessler have a superb Op-Ed on how the Obama administration — by simultaneously shielding its conduct from scrutiny through broad secrecy claims and then selectively leaking — is deliberately distorting the public understanding of its drone attacks (“First the ‘targeted killing’ campaign, then the targeted propaganda campaign”).
(3) This morning, I witnessed one of the most flagrant and repellent examples of rank government propaganda masquerading as objective journalism that I have ever seen, when I saw on Andrew Sullivan’s blog this four-minute, sleek video produced by Newsweek and The Daily Beast, starring Newsweek reporter (and its former Managing Editor) Daniel Klaidman. It’s literally painful to watch, but please do your best to endure the full four minutes, as I have a few points and questions about it afterward:
VIDEO
Did I exaggerate, or was that every bit as manipulative and repulsive as I suggested? How is it remotely justifiable — using the standards of “objective journalism” that these media outlets incessantly invoke — for Newsweek to produce a video that has little purpose other than to justify, glorify, and defend Obama’s drone attacks on other countries? Is this not one of the most glaring examples ever demonstrating that “objective journalists” like Newsweek‘s Daniel Klaidman are barred from expressing opinions — unless the opinion expressed is that the actions of the U.S. Government are justified and noble? That’s why Chris Hedges was forced out of The New York Times for opposing the attack on Iraq while John Burns was venerated and made the chief war correspondent after he supported that attack: opinions are perfectly permissible from American journalists only to the extent that they defend official actions. In what conceivable way is it the proper role of Newsweek and its national security “reporters” to produce melodramatic agitprop which vigorously takes the U.S. Government’s side in ongoing, highly divisive political controversies?
Then there’s the content itself. Klaidman (now in the midst of promoting his new book based on ample access generously provided by Obama officials) pretends to speak on behalf of — or to read the minds of — drone opponents by claiming that what really motivates opposition is the weapon’s unique “pinpoint” precision, its “almost supernatural effectiveness.” Actually, what motivates opposition are totally different and very significant facts that Klaidman completely ignores because it would spoil the creepy and uplifting message of that video — Embrace the drone. Love the drone. Become one with the drone — little things like this (“Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals”), and this (“The boy, 16, sitting with me in these photos was protesting against deadly US drone strikes… Three days later he was killed – by a US drone, says Jemima Khan”), and this (“Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his [16-year-old American] son’s death in airstrike”), and this (“In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes breed anger, and sympathy for al-Qaeda”), and this (Obama administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”).
There are multiple accounts from various sources, including Jeremy Scahill. There are international calls for investigation. It is not credible to keep ignoring one piece of evidence after another.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s report was cited in the New York Times article and in The Sunday Times of London. When the Obama administration trots out their anonymous spokesman, and his statement contains a fallacious conclusion, the article by TBIJ obtains even more credibility. If the TBIJ article was false, the Obama administration would say so in no uncertain terms.
@Mespo: “Compare the NYT, founded in 1851 . . .”
Point taken; didn’t prevent Judith Miller from being a government stooge and propagandist. But, I digress . . .
DonS:
Compare the NYT, founded in 1851, to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism” whose been around for a year and a half? I’m prepared to believe what is worthy of belief. Why is this story not otherwise sourced?
Like you I can dismiss whomever and whatever I please. I’ll dismiss this story without any more corroboration that this.
Anyone that supported Computer Aided Automatic Scream Identification (CAASI) is no skeptic, probably not a scientist, most likely a fraud.
Mespo, one of my graduate programs was in political theory. I’ll dismiss who I care to 😉
Mespo: “I’ve never heard of the “Bureau of Investigative Journalism’? Who are they and why are their writers to be believed?”
One could say that about any source, say Judith Miller writing at the NYT. In the end we believe what we want.
Your question, Mespo, seems less an honest inquiry, than a bullying challenge. Since you hijacked the last thread on drones to push your pov, we should not be surprised 😉 Just sayin.
Elaine M:
“A key message at the Drone Summit, which was touched upon time and again, was what David Cortwright, the Director of Policy Studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, referred to as “the illusion that you can counter terrorism by military force.”
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That’s an incredible statement if he means that force is not necessary to combat terrorism. If he means it is but one of the arrows in the quiver then I could understand it. By the way, were do employ more than military force to oppose terrorism. Dr. Cortwright needs a little Machiavelli to go with his Jesus of Nazareth. Thinking he can persuade persons deluded by their religion to give up mass destruction of the infidel via martyrdom with appeals to rational thought or by providing job opportunities is pure sentimentality — and dangerous.
DonS:
“I’ve got a word: Hobbes. Hobbes. He da man . . . amorally speaking.”
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Certainly you have the gravitas to dismiss the founder of modern political philosophy with a mere sentence. Maybe you could provide us with a list of your published intellectual works for comparison.
George,
In war, an ambush is a tactic used against military combatants. Hitting civilians at a funeral or coming to the rescue in ambulances is not lawful, no matter how much you may say it is.
Of course I am willing to say that the drone wars on battlefield earth have no legal, practical or ethical basis. If they were legal, why are we not allowed to see the “legal” reasoning which authorizes them? Surely such an open, transparent administration as this, “the most transparent ever” should have any problem showing us their legal justifications. So why aren’t they?
Nal:
I’ve never heard of the “Bureau of Investigative Journalism’? Who are they and why are their writers to be believed?