By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.
~John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Ch. III, (kudos to Bron)
On the night of February 13th, 773 RAF Avro Lancaster bombers swept in low and fast on the Saxony railway town of Dresden. It was early 1945, The Third Reich was collapsing and some 600,000 people had taken refuge in the city to avoid the Allied onslaught. The presumed target was the military complex on the outskirts of town known as the Albertstadt. Dresden, itself, was riddled with military garrisons intermingled among the civilian population. In two waves, the RAF dropped 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000 lbs of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000 pounds bombs on the city center, all with little to no resistance. The entire city was ablaze. RAF crews reported smoke rising to a height of 15,000 ft. Fires were seen 500 miles away from the target.
The next day, February 14, 1945, as Dresden was trying to cope with the crisis, 450 U.S. B-17 Flying Fortress long-range bombers assigned to the 1st Bombardment Division of the United States VIII Bomber Command arrived at 1230 local time. Guided by the fires, they discharged 771 tons of bombs.
The results on the ground were horrific with an estimated 25,000 killed. Survivor Lothar Metzger recalled:
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Some estimates bring the number of those killed to 100,000. Nazi propagandists took the figure to 200,000. RAF recon noted that ” 23 percent of the industrial buildings, and 56 percent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78,000 dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged, but readily repairable.”
The raid, ordered by Churchill, rendered such a blow to Western psyche that he distanced himself from the raid saying, “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so-called ‘area-bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies… We must see to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy’s war effort.” Of mention, is no sense of the human cost to the enemy of the raid. Th emphasis seems to be purely egocentric: What kind of country will we have when this is all over?
However British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris was not so circumspect:
“Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.”
“War is hell” seems to claim the Air Marshall, and strategic concerns take precedence over humanitarian ones in a war zone. Is he right, or are both he and Churchill “war criminals” to quote some of the more animated commentary on the blog? Neither were prosecuted or charged with war crimes for the Dresden raid.
Which brings us to David Drumm’s fine posting yesterday about a claim of double-tapping Drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere in support of the war against the terrorists. The evidence published by the 18-month-old Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) claims that 6 instances of double-tapping have occurred with rescuers being targeted with second strikes. A review of 5 of those sources (ABC’s article was not easily retrievable) reveals that one arguably involved an attack on civilians, one was unclear on the status of the rescuers, and three reported second attacks on militants and extremists.
In response to my query on this point, David correctly pointed out that the Obama Administration does consider fighting age men in the strike zone “militants.” That fact was disclosed in a long New York Times article:
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
But does six instances of secondary attacks obscured by the fog of war prove that the US has a policy of targeting innocent rescuers? Can it even be said that we are indifferent to the humanitarian concerns of rescuers even as we attack our enemies on their home turf?
From a legal perspective, targeting killing of persons who present an imminent threat to a country is permissible. Obama himself has insisted on such evidence before authorizing the strikes though there are trade-offs, according to the New York Times. The CIA’s man in the White House, John Brennan, a crusty Irishman who has spoken in defense of civil liberties and to close Guantanamo but who has faced withering criticism for his role in post 9/11 interrogations, explains Obama’s analysis:
The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons’ lives. It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.
Assassination of persons is generally regarded as murder although, by executive order, the US President may order the killing of foreign leaders who represent an imminent threat to the US.
Former U.S. District Judge (S.D. NY) Abraham Sofaer explains the difference:
When people call a targeted killing an “assassination,” they are attempting to preclude debate on the merits of the action. Assassination is widely defined as murder, and is for that reason prohibited in the United States…. U.S. officials may not kill people merely because their policies are seen as detrimental to our interests…. But killings in self-defense are no more “assassinations” in international affairs than they are murders when undertaken by our police forces against domestic killers. Targeted killings in self-defense have been authoritatively determined by the federal government to fall outside the assassination prohibition.
Likewise, Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser US Department of State, defends the use of drones as ” part of “responsibility of US to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.”
But what then about rescuers killed trying to aid militants?
Georgetown Law Professor Gary Solis, author The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War, and no friend of the US drone policy concedes that “Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death.” In an example, published by Harper’s Magazine, Solis comments on a US helicopter attack on civilians rendering aid to combatants. “Can a van picking up wounded victims be fired upon? If the helicopter personnel reasonably associated the unmarked van with the presumed enemy personnel, yes. An “enemy” vehicle without red cross, red crescent, or white flag receives no special protection, even if wounded personnel are on board.”
Thus, even critics of the drone program conclude that trying to render humanitarian aid to injured militants affords no protection unless they are clearly visible as such. There is nothing in any of the articles cited by the BIJ indicating that rescuers were so denominated.
What then to make of the double-tap policy and the humanitarian toll. I see no proof that US drone masters are “targeting civilians.” Targeting implies intention and given the Administration’s definition of militants in a strike area it is unlikely that there is the intention to harm civilians rescuers where proof of such status exists. The Administration argues that its definition is based on its decade long experience with al-Qaeda. One certainly can argue with the definition of “militant” given its breadth, but does this definition make us any more culpable that acknowledged WWII heroes Winston Churchill or Air Chief Marshall Harris in arguing that our prime responsibility in war is to deny the enemy the ability to wage war against us even as civilians are maimed or killed?
What do you think?
Sources: linked throughout
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
The CIA never takes a junior partner role with any of these groups and we have to assume wants this to continue. The New York Times(Oct. 27, 2009) reports that Karzai’s brother is on the CIAs payroll and is a suspected player in the opium trade which finances the Taliban.
All of this only contributes to a more chaotic situation which feeds a hidden agenda for a “no win war” and prolonged conflict at the expense of American boys and girls lives!!
woody voinche
The CIA are the original ‘Chaos’. Everything they do turns to crap and worse, they are making profits off their devious misdeeds, profiting from crimes any one of us would be put away for the rest of our natural lives. Murder, drug dealing, lying, cheating, double dealing sociopaths.
If we could improve one thing in our foreign policy it would be to get rid of the CIA completely and start over.
“Is it even necessary to point out how preposterous it is to claim that the dead man’s Fifth Amendment rights were guaranteed because members of the Executive Branch had long discussions about how and when to kill him? Jesus, just kill the guy. The Bushies may have had manifest contempt for due process, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to make a burlesque out of it.”
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-kill-list-9257224
Thanks Elaine.
mespo:
Nice trick conflating nuclear weapons with all weapons of mass destruction.
No Win War???
The New American for November 9, 2009, has an interesting article on General Barry McCaffrey’s statement that the US “faces 10 more years of war in Afghanistan” and that the US should “focus upon a long and expensive nation-building process for Afghanistan’s tribal culture.” There seems to be a mindset in the establishment for the US to maintain a long term presence in the MidEast.
For a long time, the US has operated in the region through hidden agendas. In his book, The New World Order, Mr. Pat Robertson, states that George Bush 1 suggested that the fate of Kuwait was not the main issue, “launching the New World Order was the main thing.” Mr. Robertson further writes, “By words and by silence, the United States flashed Saddam Hussein a green light” … to move into Kuwait and suggests this was used as a pretext for the 1st Gulf War…the implication is that Saddam was entraped with Green Light Diplomacy but there was a much larger agenda(hidden) for moving against Hussein………..
For the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the evidence suggests that the US and its allies are not doing all that can be done to win this war and there is some agenda for prolonging this conflict.
The Advocate quotes Hillary Clinton(Dec. 7, 2009, p. 5A), stating it is “hard to believe” that no one in Islamabad knows where the al-Qaida leaders are hiding and couldn’t get them “if they really wanted to.”
In the aftermath of 9.11, the bombing of the wrong escape route out of Afghanistan into Pakistan and the nighttime airlift by the US of the Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives that were allowed to escape(The New Yorker, Jan 28, 2002, p. 36); Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIAs team at Tora Bora said they tracked bin Laden and (he) “…could have been caught.”(Newsweek, Aug 15, 2005, p. 5); There is evidence that the Pakistani ISI is funding the Taliban and knows where they live but dont arrest them.(Time, Nov. 29, 2004, p. 44)
There is a strategy by the Pakistani government “…which pays tribes and insurgent networks to attack each other with a goal of preventing any one group from getting too strong”.(US News, Oct 13/Oct 20, 2008, p. 24)(a strategy used by the Brits) Pakistani Ambassador, Haqqani presents evidence in his book that the Pakistani military and ISI make “…the pretense of arresting militants in order to get funds from Washinton. But it never shut down the networks.”(Newsweek, May 11/May 18, 2009, p. 29)
The CIA never takes a junior partner role with any of these groups and we have to assume wants this to continue. The New York Times(Oct. 27, 2009) reports that Karzai’s brother is on the CIAs payroll and is a suspected player in the opium trade which finances the Taliban.
All of this only contributes to a more chaotic situation which feeds a hidden agenda for a “no win war” and prolonged conflict at the expense of American boys and girls lives!!
woody voinche
“Worldwide, the likelihood of terrorists being capable of producing or obtaining WMD may be growing due to looser controls of stockpiles and technology in the former Soviet states specifically, and the broader dissemination of related technology and information in general. However, WMD remain significantly harder to produce or obtain than what is commonly depicted in the press. The Central Intelligence Agency has reported that it is likely that most terrorists will continue to choose conventional explosives over WMD, but warns that the al-Queda network has made obtaining WMD capability a very high priority.”
CRS Report for Congress: “Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Terrorist Threat” by Steve Bowman (Specialist in National Defense Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division)
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/9184.pdf
“Yet, WMD terrorism skeptics abound, and for understandable reasons. There is widespread suspicion in America and abroad that WMD terrorism is another phony threat being hyped for political purposes, and to stoke fears among the public. It is difficult to debunk this allegation, given the US government’s lack of credibility in the case of Iraqi WMD. That said, WMD terrorism is not Iraqi WMD. The case that the WMD terrorism threat is real bears no association with the Iraqi intelligence failure whatsoever, in terms of the reliability of the sources of intelligence, the quality of the information that has been collected, and the weight of the evidence that lies at the heart of our understanding of the threat. If anything, the biases in WMD terrorism analysis tilt towards treating the absence of information as an absence of threat; this could become a vulnerability in the defenses, considering the very real possibility that there may be a terrorist plot in motion that has not been found.
On the other side of the spectrum, even for the most ardent believers in the threat posed by WMD terrorism, it must be acknowledged that much of the rhetoric expressed by the top levels of the group might be just that: mere saber rattling in an increasingly desperate bid to remain relevant, to frighten their enemies, and to rally their followers with promises of powerful weapons that will reverse their losses on the battlefield. It is also possible that al Qaeda may be engaging in a classic deception ruse, hoping to misdirect their foe with fears of mass destruction, in order to preserve the element of surprise for the fulfillment of their true intentions.”
“Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality?
A Timeline of Terrorists’ Efforts to Acquire WMD” by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19852/al_qaeda_weapons_of_mass_destruction_threat.html
mespo:
from what I understand they can track the signature of the fissile material, any rogue state who gave a terrorist a nuclear weapon would be in for a pounding. I imagine that is why we havent seen one go off in our country as yet. The Paks and the DPRK dont want to be evaporated.
It is a threat from Iran, those Mullahs are crazy.
MM:
“Gene,
A good rejoinder to the usual fear-mongering over “terrorists” acquiring nuclear weapons. Not at all likely. But if unexamined and hyped long enough, it makes a dependable bogeyman — its only real purpose.”
**********************
Sadly, the real experts aren’t as sanguine as you and Gene on the topic but who are they to question you:
“The National Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism predicted that “there is a better than an even chance that terrorists will use weapons of mass destruction within the next five years.”
and
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/17529/nuclear_terrorism_faq.html
Must be nice to diminish the threat to you fellow countrymen while you bask in the relative safety of your off-shore accommodations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jun/12/internet-trolls-bill-defamation-online
Obama’s drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder
Executive privilege has seduced the president into a reckless ‘kill first, ask questions later’ policy that explodes the US constitution
By Michael Boyle
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 June 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/11/obama-drone-wars-normalisation-extrajudicial-killing
Excerpt:
The creation of this “kill list” – as well as the dramatic escalation in drone strikes, which have now killed at least 2,400 people in Pakistan alone, since 2004 – represents a betrayal of President Obama’s promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution. As Charles Pierce has noted, there is nothing in the constitution that allows the president to wage a private war on individuals outside the authorization of Congress.
The spirit of the constitution was quite the opposite: all of the founders were concerned, in varying degrees, with the risk of allowing the president to exercise too much discretion when declaring war or using force abroad. For this reason, the constitution explicitly grants the right to declare war to the Congress in order to restrain the president from chasing enemies around the world based solely on his authority as commander-in-chief. The founders would be horrified, not comforted, to know that the president has implicated himself in the killing of foreign nationals in states against which the Congress has not passed a declaration of war.
Beyond bypassing the constitution and the War Powers Act, the Obama administration has also adopted a dangerously broad interpretation of the legal right to use drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad. According to his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, the legal authority for the drone strikes derives from the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress in September 2001 to authorize the attack on Afghanistan. He notes that there is “nothing in the AUMF that restricts the use of military force against al-Qa’ida to Afghanistan”.
This interpretation treats the AUMF as a warrant to allow the president to use force against anyone at any time in a war without a defined endpoint.
Together with the bland assertion that the US has the right to self-defense against al-Qaida under international law, these legal arguments have enabled the president to expand drone operations against terrorist organizations to Yemen and Somalia, as well as to escalate the campaign against militant networks in Pakistan. To date, Obama has launched 278 drone strikes against targets in Pakistan. The use of drone strikes is now so commonplace that some critics have begun to wonder if the administration has adopted a “kill, not capture” policy, forsaking the intelligence gains of capturing suspects for an approach that leaves no one alive to pose a threat.
This vast, expansive interpretation of executive power to enable drone wars conducted in secret around the globe has also set dangerous precedent, which the administration has not realized or acknowledged. Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the “kill list” will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.
For those Democrats who are comforted by the fact that Obama has the final say in authorizing drone strikes and so refuse to criticize the administration, ask yourself: would you be as comfortable if the next decision on who is killed by a drone was left to President Romney, or President Palin?
Also in contravention of his campaign promises, the Obama administration has worked to expand its power of the executive and to resist oversight from the other branches of government. While candidate Obama insisted that even terrorist suspects deserved their due process rights and a chance to defend themselves in some kind of a court, his administration has now concluded that a review of the evidence by the executive branch itself – even merely a hasty discussion during one of the “Terror Tuesdays” – is equivalent to granting a terrorist suspect due process rights. With little fanfare, it has also concluded that American citizens may now be killed abroad without access to a “judicial process”.
As the complexity and consequences of the drone strikes have grown, the administration has insisted that it alone should be trusted with the decision about when drone strikes are permitted, and consequently provides only the bare minimum of information to congressional oversight committees about drone activities.
What is also striking about Obama’s embrace of drones and targeted killings is that he – who, during his 2008 campaign, displayed awareness that America’s reckless actions abroad were damaging to its long-term interests – has become so indifferent to civilian casualties…
Obama’s Kill List and the End of the Post-9/11 World
By Charles P. Pierce
May 29, 2012
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-kill-list-9257224
Excerpt:
Let’s get the easiest stuff out of the way first. There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that allows the president to make private war on individuals. Any historical precedent you can cite is rooted not in that document, but in the steady historical draining of the war powers from the Congress, where the Founders anchored them, to the Executive branch, all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates, when Jefferson circumvented the requirements by sending a fleet off to Africa and not telling Congress until it was too late to recall it. What enables this president — any president — to behave in such a manner is custom and tradition, an historical easement granted by the Congress across its clearly defined sovereign territory because Congress has grown too timid to stand up for itself in this area, occasionally passing some fig leaf nonsense that it says amounts to a declaration of war. (Jefferson finally blackjacked one of those out of the Congress.) Except that, under the Constitution, nothing “amounts to” a declaration of war. War is declared or it isn’t. You can argue that, in doing what he’s doing, the president is acting in accordance with longstanding policy, and even that he’s acting in the best interest of the nation, but you cannot argue that he is upholding the Constitution he swore to preserve and protect, because he’s not. And no pet lawyer can say that he is.
All the talk about “flexibility” and how the president manages to keep all his options open reminds me of nothing more than all that Neustadt and Graham Allison that we learned in the aftermath of the Kennedy Administration. JFK was big on flexibility and options, too. Sooner or later, that led to body counts, and the new math of the old slaughter. There are echoes of this here….
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization – innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
How about the guy pushing the goat cart up the other side of the road when the trucks with the guns drive by? Is he up to no good or is he just going to work? And how do we count him? Or do we? And, all the same to you, I’d rather not have the “explicit intelligence” that I am innocent produced “posthumously” just because it keeps your bookkeeping clean. What in hell good is it to me then? Am I less dead?
I think I finally grasp President Obama’s infatuation with Medieval Scholastic Philosophy as a guide to extra-judicial murder by the monarch. See, If you kill people now, they can’t ever do anything to you later, whether they ever intended to or not. Ergo, the fewer people, the safer you can feel. And since you can easily bring the dead back to life again if “explicit intelligence posthumously proves them innocent,” then just assume them guilty in this life with the possibility of appeal in the next. And if no one ever comes back exonerated from the dead, then you can assume the correctness of your “sentence first, verdict later” policy. This sort of philosophical reasoning worked really well back during the Salem witch trials.
And to think that our ancestors fought a bloody revolutionary war to free themselves from King George the Third only to see their descendants enthusiastically install King Barack the First right back on the throne again. But at least this must prove that the “terrorists” can’t possibly hate us for our freedoms because we’ve surrendered them all. T. S. Elliot had it right about “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
TalkinDog turned on the Dogalogue machine so that all of this article and each of the many comments were barked out to us dogs in the dog pack. I want you humans to know that we dogs never argue like you folks do. Even BitchinDog holds her tongue. It is the topic of war and killing. Killing in your name if you are an American. Those drones are your drones. Those marines are your marines. So the guilt of the collective acts of killing have set you all off today. We dogs have never seen you argue like this. Perhaps a drone should have a pilot, a pilot a list of all he kills, all the relatives of those he kills should have an email address for the relatives of the pilot and talk back and forth. TalkinDog is always talkin and that was his idea. Me? I say its time to get back to the topic of Bomb, bomb, Iran.
[that ought to set some of them off] Oops. Things that show up in parenthetical marks are not supposed to show up here. Bad Dogalogue machine!
Send in the drones:
A North Carolina man pleaded guilty to murdering both a 28-year-old woman and a 4-year-old child he reportedly believed was gay.
As WRAL is reporting, prosecutors had been planning to seek the death penalty for Peter Lucas Moses, who has been charged with the deaths of Jadon Higganbothan, 4, and Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, 28.
The 27-year-old Moses is also allegedly the leader of radical religious sect, whose members comprised a number of women and children who called him “Lord.” Moses reportedly lived together with at least three of those women, who counted themselves as his “wives,” and nine children and in a one-bedroom Durham home. Moses is the biological father of all the children, except for Jadon.
bfm,
If that is what you inferred, that was not what I intended to imply. No threat works against those who not only fail to fear death but worship it – be it in the form of martyrdom or the idea of pursuing the Rapture. The bottom line is that against a determined (or worse – crazy) opponent, no amount of deterrent is sufficient. None. But that threat of retaliation in this instance is not a threat so much as it is an inevitable consequence of the action. For rational actors, the deterrent value still applies. I am not saying the threat is not real. I am saying it is exaggerated in the name of fear mongering. “That fact should highlight the need to find other methods besides retaliation and intimidation to deal with the problem of radical Islam.” Part and parcel of my point exactly and including methods of conventional warfare. They are networked criminal organization and they should be fought like all organized crime. But in the end, if a terrorist group does go nuclear? If it doesn’t trigger an accidental global thermonuclear war, they will be the very last group to ever try such a thing by the time retribution is had. They will be made example. They will be exterminated by the mutual agreement of nations. Unfortunately, it might take such an act to give nations the impetus to finally do away with nuclear weapons for good. Some lessons come with very high prices.
The US government should never have spread nuclear material around in the first place and shouldn’t be supporting the nuclear power industry either.
We cant safely deal with the material we have now, so no more should be mined or processed until we do. The majority of the US plants are another Fukishima waiting to happen, and need trillions of dollars to modernize.
Jill,
Well spoken about the duty of American citizens to force an end to U. S. Government policies harmful to our nation as well as other nations. The crude, lawless doctrine that “might makes right” now governs the actions of the American Government and we will either disabuse our government of this discredited philosophy — as some of us did forty years ago — or watch our country disintegrate into either outright fascism or corporate neo-feudalism.
Keep up the good work raising the alarm, because we’ve got the Weimar Republic of America staring us in the face, grinning lewdly from ear to ear. .
Another good assessment of President Obama’s “double-tap-dancing-on-dead-Muslims” policy comes from Patrick Cockburn of The Independent/UK (Published on Sunday, June 10, 2012) here with America is Deluded by Its Drone-Warfare Propaganda.
American presidents always resort to the indiscriminate “air power” placebo whenever they need to evacuate their marooned legionnaires from yet another untenable trap. Nixon used B-52s. Obama uses drones. This just makes the foreign rubble bounce while entertaining the yokels back home with meaningless body counts of “baseball card” fatalities among the faceless. American presidents often do this. They think that their pet rampaging elephant can tiptoe out of the demolished foreign china shop without the American circus crowd noticing and refusing to buy any more tickets to the carnival of corrupt corporate carnivores.
Gene, I remember that on 9-11, several known terrorist groups, as well as a couple I had never heard of, claimed credit for the attacks. Later that same day, every one of those groups retracted their claims. “OOPS–Just kidding!,” was the general meme. I think somebody figured out what was likely to happen to them if they continued to make the claim.
MM,
One need only follow that tactic to its logical end. Far from being lauded as heroes, any terrorist group stupid enough to use nuclear materials would be signing their own death warrants from every country in the world in great big bold Crayon strokes. They would be hunted and gunned down like rabid dogs by everyone not a member of their group no matter who their target might have been or where they chose to hide. No other country could take the chance that they would be the next target. As a tactic, the threat is far more valuable than the action.
@Gene H. “They would be hunted and gunned down”
I think you are right on that. And I agree that the real power of nuclear weapons is in the threat not the use. But you seem to imply that the threat of retaliation will protect us from the use of nuclear materials by radicals.
When our adversary was the Soviet Union, the ultimate materialist, threats of retaliation made a lot of sense. There was a whole game theoretic analysis of mutually assured destruction and other strategies. What ever the usefulness of this kind of analysis, the fact is that during the cold war, nation states acted with restraint and the world survived.
But when many of the radicals ‘love death more then we love life’ and are willing to sacrifice not just themselves but other devout Muslims, I have to wonder how effective the threat of retaliation could possibly be in preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction.
I suspect the answer is not very much.
Whatever the rationality of the very top echelon, there seem to be many radicals who will willingly sacrifice themselves in order to bring destruction on their enemy and further their cause. That fact should highlight the need to find other methods besides retaliation and intimidation to deal with the problem of radical Islam.
Shano, it’s interesting that you use Waco for the example. Janet Reno used, as the excuse for what was done in Waco, the “fact” that there was child abuse in the compound. She said, “They were slapping the babies around.” First of all, the child abuse investigations that had been conducted at Waco (by the state agency that conducts child abuse investigations for the rest of the state as well) came up without findings and without prosecutions. So, if there was officially “NO CHILD ABUSE” then how could she suddenly come up with that for an excuse? Secondly, when she was AG of Florida (wow, what a recommendation!) she was rightfully blamed for a child abuse investigation that devoted eight whole minutes to a botched interview of a child who tried four times to convince authorities (and who DID convince authorities in another state) that he had been abused, but she officially “unfounded” the case and subjected him to a ten-year debacle ending with an assault, at age 17, in which he and his father were both injured and he was placed in emergency care and his father was jailed overnight, after which it was tacitly admitted by all concerned that there should be no more forced contact between them. When this kid was grown, he was going into a library years later, and Janet Reno was heading into the same library. They met at the door. He said, “Are you Janet Reno?” Yes, she answered. He said, “You ruined my life!” She asked, “Are you [Minor Child Doe]?” He said he was. She said, “That wasn’t my fault; I had to do what I did.”
So, she had to NOT recognize child abuse in Florida because it suited her purposes, whatever they were. And then, when she wanted an excuse for Waco, she had to RECOGNIZE child abuse after it was unfounded by the agency authorized to investigate and identify it.
This all to say, simply, that where there are government abuses, there are government people explaining exactly why those government abuses are necessary. And they are the same government people who will explain exactly the OPPOSITE it it suits their purpose in another situation.
It is sickening; it is illogical; it “overthrows the mind and breaks the heart,” but it is not going to change. Not here, not in the Middle East, not anywhere.
We also have a religious sect of Mormons who were practicing child rape in polygamous villages on the Arizona/ Utah border.
Do these people all represent Mitt Romney?
Should we send in the drones? Oh, you know one day it will happen here in the US with the justification to prevent another Waco, Texas incident.
Surgical strike sounds so tidy.