-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
We are so kind to ourselves. John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, repeats the Obama narrative that touts the “surgical” precision and minimization of collateral damage of “targeted killing” using drones. Minimal collateral damage would be zero, however, a study by NYU School of Law and Stanford Law School puts the number of civilians killed between 474 and 881, including 176 children.
The study calls Obama’s narrative “false.”
The NYU/Stanford study also reports on Obama’s despicable use of the “double tap”:
The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur and Professor of Human Rights Law, has said that if first responders “are indeed being intentionally targeted, there is no doubt about the law: those strikes are a war crime.”
Reaper drones carry the Hellfire II laser guided missile with a 20 pound warhead of high explosive, and two 500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs. The GBU-12 has a blast radius of 200 meters, hardly surgical. These are the same weapons that are dropped from other platforms such as manned aircraft. Their precision is not enhanced when launched from drones.
The Hellfire missile has a Circular Error Probability (CEP), the distance from the aiming point that the missile will land 50% of the time, from 9 to 24 feet. he NYU/Stanford study cites a claim that the “double tap” may be a second strike required because the first one missed the target, although that is hardly a mitigating circumstance.
The NYU/Stanford study also notes that “the vast majority of the ‘militants’ targeted have been low-level insurgents.” The number of “high-level” targets is estimated at only 2%.
The Obama administration is using Bush-style tactics to cover up the killing of women and children. This includes over-hyping the accuracy of the weapons and redefining the term “militant” to include anyone who’s killed.
While drones can play an effective role as intelligence gathers and fire support on the battlefield, their inaccuracy makes them unsuitable for “targeted killing.” The probability of a drone strike killing women and children is so high that the drone can be reasonably considered a terror weapon and its use an act of terrorism. The media’s collusion on the Obama narrative enables the terrorism.
H/T: Glenn Greenwald, Kevin Drum, Daniel L. Byman (Brookings), TBIJ, Aviation International News, openDemocracy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/michael-boyle-visceral-ha_n_2480590.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/michael-boyle-visceral-ha_n_2480590.html)
Drones are fool’s gold: they prolong wars we can’t win
New appointments in the White House hail an era of hands-free warfare. Yet these weapons induce not defeat, but retaliation
The Guardian, Thursday 10 January 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/10/drones-fools-gold-prolong-wars
Excerpt:
The drone wars seem pointless yet unstoppable. Their appeal to western leaders lies partly in their sheer novelty, partly in the hope they may make defeat less awful. They are like the USS New Jersey’s shelling of Lebanon’s Chouf mountains in 1984, a blood-thirsty display to cover withdrawal. The drone is not an aid to victory, but it eases the defeat its use has made more likely.
The Taliban in Waziristan are no threat to London or to Washington. Al-Qaida can do no more to undermine the state than set off the occasional bomb, best prevented by domestic intelligence. Today’s “wars of choice” reflect a more sinister aspect of democracy. Elected leaders seem to crave them, defying all warnings of the difficulty of ending them. Mesmerised by Margaret Thatcher’s gain from the Falklands, they all want a good war.
In this the drone is fool’s gold. Driven by high-pressure arms salesmanship, Obama (and David Cameron) are briefed that they are the no-hands war of the future, safe, easy, clean, “precision targeted”. No one on our side need get hurt. Someone else can do the dirty work on the ground.
The tenuous legality of this form of combat requires the aggressor to have “declared war” on another state. But al-Qaida is no state. As a result these attacks on foreign soil are not just wars of choice, they are wars of self-invention. How soon will it be before the US finds itself “at war” with Iran and Syria, and sends over the drones? When it does, and the killing starts, it can hardly complain when the victims retaliate with suicide bombers.
Nor will it just be suicide bombers. Drones are cheap and will easily proliferate. Eleven states deploy them already. The US is selling them to Japan to help against China. China is building 11 bases for its Anjian drones along its coast. The Pentagon is now training more drone operators than pilots. What happens when every nation with an air force does likewise, and every combustible border is buzzing with them?
I did not fear nuclear proliferation because I believe such bombs are mere prestige acquisitions, so horrible not even lunatics would use them. Drones are different. When they were called guided missiles, they were in some degree governed by international law and protocol, as was the practice of global assassination.
Obama rejects all that. He and the US are teaching the world that a pilotless aircraft is a self-justifying, self-exonerating, legal and effective weapon of war. However counter-productive a drone may be strategically, it cuts a glamorous dash on the home front. It is hard to imagine a greater danger to world peace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/americas-use-of-drones-the-legality-issue.html
America’s Use of Drones: The Legality Issue
Published: November 30, 2012
“Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy” (front page, Nov. 25) raises the issue of the legality of the United States’ ever-changing drone policy.
As his first term in office draws to a close, and with a vacancy to fill at the top of the Central Intelligence Agency, President Obama has an opportunity to press the reset button on American drone policy.
Over the last four years the use of drones has become ever more permissive. Lethal strikes are no longer restricted to “high-value targets,” Guilt, not innocence, is the apparent presumption.
Administration sources have told the media that in the tribal areas of Pakistan, men of fighting age are assumed to be combatant targets in the absence of intelligence to the contrary. If true, this is both unconscionable and a violation of the laws of war.
This can’t go on. American drones have taken lives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines. Meaningful public review of this most secretive of government programs is long overdue. We don’t need a new rule book; we just need the existing rules — international human rights and humanitarian law — to be applied.
SUZANNE NOSSEL
Executive Director
Amnesty International USA
New York, Nov. 27, 2012
To the Editor:
You report that President Obama is finally expressing some “wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. ‘There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,’ he said.”
What an understatement of the “mess on our hands” given how 76 countries now possess drones, having discovered how cheap and easy they are to develop and use! Whose hands will they fall into? More and more people in foreign countries living under American drone strikes have understandably become radicalized. Didn’t anyone consider how they would make the perfect weapon of asymmetrical warfare?
Pandora’s box has opened wide, adding to our “vexing security problems.” We should never have forgotten what Sir Peter Ustinov is credited as saying: Terrorism is the poor man’s war, and war is terrorism of the rich.
COLEEN ROWLEY
Apple Valley, Minn., Nov. 26, 2012
The writer is the retired F.B.I. agent who exposed intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/white-house-presses-for-drone-rule-book.html)
Priosn for Protesting Drones
Got this in my email from Rootsaction.:
My name is Brian Terrell. I’m co-coordinator of a group called Voices for Creative Nonviolence. We support the petition to ban drones organized by RootsAction. On November 30th I report for six months in a federal prison in Yankton, S.D., as a result of protesting drones.
The appearance of war being made easy by drones is resulting in more war. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and in places we don’t know about, in places where we are not at war, we’re sending these unmanned pilotless airplanes into foreign air space to hunt down people who’ve been accused of crimes only in the private court of the administration. They’re hunted down and killed along with anybody who might be in the immediate vicinity.
Drones are creating new wars rather than scaling down old ones. Drone pilots in Afghanistan have been targeted and killed. Drone pilots in the United States suffer PTSD at higher rates than real pilots.
Drone victims are 98% innocent civilians according to the recent Stanford/NYU study. The other 2% are targeted victims of murder without charge, trial, due process, or in many cases even knowing the target’s name.
Drones buzzing over houses traumatize children before they kill them. That those children are (in most cases) not American hardly diminishes the immorality.
Drones are rapidly being developed and deployed by other nations. Would you support the equal right of other nations to kill with drones in this country? And if not, why not? And how can that thinking not apply to U.S. policy as well?
As I head to prison I urge you to add your name to the petition to ban drones and to ask others to do so.
Back on April 15th, about 40 people, mostly from the Kansas City area, went to Whiteman Air Force Base and held a short rally outside the gates on a public right of way. We had a petition — an indictment we called it — that listed the laws that drones are violating and the damage they are doing. We took that to the gate and were stopped. Three of us asked directions to deliver the petition and were immediately put in handcuffs. About 40 military police in full riot gear appeared (video) and did a choreographed dance including high kicks and grunts and beating their shields, two steps forward and one step back, to get rid of the rest of the U.S. citizens, who were acting legally under the First Amendment.
At my sentencing I told the judge:
“Each of the government’s witnesses, all of them Air Force police personnel, testified that participants in this protest were nonviolent, respectful and peaceable in assembling at Whiteman Air Force Base, a government installation, to petition that government for redress of a grievance, demanding that the remote control killing carried out daily from Whiteman cease. They testified that at no time, before or during our protest, did they perceive us as a threat.
“Our expert witnesses testified that our behavior was consistent with the activities that the drafters of the First Amendment intended to be protected, not persecuted, by the government. The order and security of the base would not have been compromised had the security police allowed us to proceed to the headquarters to deliver our petition. No testimony to the contrary was offered this court.
“Instead of planning to accommodate a constitutionally protected peaceable assembly, however, the Air Force chose intimidation and conspired to deprive us of the rights they are sworn to protect. We learned from government witnesses that the phalanx of goose-stepping riot police is a ‘Confrontation Management Team,’ deployed only in the case of preannounced events. Whiteman security did not call out the Team to defend the base but to intimidate citizens engaged in lawful activities.”
Sign the petition to ban militarized drones now, before it is delivered to government officials.
Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends.
–Brian Terrell for RootsAction.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/american-drones_n_2199193.html ” American Drones Ignite New Arms Race From Gaza To Iran To China” Posted: 11/27/2012 3:01 pm EST
Gee, what a surprise.
Obama administration must account to Congress for targeted assassinations
The White House will not even release the legal advice about its drone kill policy. The American people needs full oversight
by Dennis Kucinich
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/16/obama-administration-account-congress-targeted-assassinations
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the issue of progressive politics. I want to play an excerpt from our six-hour election special last night, about the secret drone war that’s expanded under President Obama. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill asked Congressmember Dennis Kucinich on our show about the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen last year.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I just wanted to ask you—I was talking about you earlier and saying that with the loss of you, or with you not being in the House anymore, there basically isn’t another Democrat who filled the space that you did, particularly on civil liberties issues, on foreign policy issues. And I was—I was just remembering the last time that I visited you in Washington.
We were talking about how you put forward this bill after it became clear that President Obama had authorized the killing of a U.S. citizen, Anwar Awlaki, who had not been charged with any crime, had not been indicted with any crime. And this was well before Awlaki was killed. Of course, he was killed in a drone strike in September of 2011, along with another U.S. citizen, Samir Khan, who had also not been indicted and whose family had been told by the FBI that he had not committed any crimes. Then two weeks later, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman was killed while he was having dinner with his teenage cousins and friends. And there’s been no explanation as to why that young American citizen was killed in this drone strike. So you had Obama killing—or authorizing operations that killed three U.S. citizens in a two-week period.
And when you, a year before this happened, put forward legislation in the Congress, that didn’t mention Awlaki by name but just said that the president does not have the right to unilaterally authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen without due process, only six of your colleagues signed on to that legislation. I mean, to me, that’s one of the sort of enduring symbols of your legacy in Congress, the fact that you were one of only half-a-dozen members of Congress—not a single senator—to simply state on the record that American citizens have the right not to be assassinated by their own government without due process.
What—what is your—I mean, what is your sense of how much damage this administration has done to those core causes that you fought for for so long?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: First of all, thank you.
Secondly, it’s amazing that we’re in an America where we have to defend the rights of Americans to be free from assassination by their own country, to be free from extrajudicial killing by their own government.
I expect that the Obama administration will continue their policies of drone strikes, which have killed hundreds of innocent people and have put to death, through drone strikes, thousands of individuals who were just determined to be combatants, often because they happened to be the wrong age. This is repugnant to morality. It’s morally depraved, this drone strikes. And whether you’re a Democrat or Republican doesn’t matter. This is about what kind of human beings we are.
When partisan politics trumps morality, we are in big trouble. So I had no problem whatsoever in challenging this administration, the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, or any other administration, whenever I felt the—the honor of our country, the heart of our country was at risk.
The drone situation is abominable. By the way, I’m going to have a briefing in Washington on November 16th on the drone policies. We’re going to be bringing some of the top people in the world who have something to say about this and could be considered experts, on civil liberties and other matters.
But our country is changing, you know, and think about this: drones are now being offered and used domestically. How long is it before some local police department uses a drone to intercept and kill a suspect, and when that becomes commonplace? People say, “Oh, well, that can’t happen.” Well, it’s happening now overseas, and we’re committing acts of war in other countries without Congress’s knowledge or without Congress’s assent. We’ve got a problem here. And no matter who wins tonight, we still have a problem.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s outgoing Congressmember Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland, Ohio. He lost in a challenge to Marcy Kaptur when they were redistricted. Marcy Kaptur also won last night in Ohio, beating “Joe the Plumber,” whose real name is Samuel Wurzelbacher.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll stay with Ben Jealous of the NAACP and journalist Laura Flanders, but we’re going to talk about the ballot initiatives around the country and more about progressive politics. Stay with us.
Jeremy Scahill and Dennis Kucinich: In Obama’s 2nd Term, Will Dems Challenge U.S. Drones, Killings?
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/7/jeremy_scahill_and_dennis_kucinich_in
During Democracy Now!’s seven-hour election special last night, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill asks Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich about the secret drone war that has expanded under President Obama’s first term and the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen struck by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen last year. [includes rush transcript]
Filed under Election 2012, Drone Attacks, Yemen, Pakistan, Jeremy Scahill, Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Guests:
Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter and Democracy Now! correspondent.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, U.S. representative from Ohio.
Got this in my email re Apple app and drone strikes.,:
Apple Inc., which has received over $9 million in Pentagon contracts in recent years, has rejected from its App Store, and therefore from all iPhones, a simple informative application.
Drones+ is an application that shows no depictions of the carnage of war and reveals no secret information. It simply adds a location to a map every time a drone strike is reported in the media and added to a database maintained by the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Apple has rejected the app as “objectionable and crude.”
Drone wars continue because the U.S. public is unaware what is being done in our name with our money. We are interested in knowing where our government is using drones and has killed people, not in celebrating that killing.
The people in Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere living under the drones can’t ignore what’s being done to them. Neither should we, as it’s done with our money and in our names.
A recent study by Stanford and NYU found that drones traumatize innocent populations, who have no way of knowing how to protect themselves from drone strikes. Further, only 2% of victims of these strikes are high-level targets. The drones kill civilian men, women, and children, are being used to target rescuers, schools and funerals, and create significant anti-U.S. hostility — exactly as the Pakistani and Afghan governments have said they do.
Ask Apple to stop hiding the simplest of facts.
(this is click to petition – http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6750 )
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/25/un-inquiry-us-drone-strikes
UN to investigate civilian deaths from US drone strikes
Special rapporteur on counter-terror operations condemns Barack Obama’s failure to establish effective monitoring process
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 October 2012 13.07 EDT
The United Nations is to set up a dedicated investigations unit in Geneva to examine the legality of drone attacks in cases where civilians are killed in so-called ‘targeted’ counter-terrorism operations.
The announcement was made by Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard law school in which he condemned secret rendition and waterboarding as crimes under international law.
His forthright comments, directed at both US presidential candidates, will be seen as an explicit challenge to the prevailing US ideology of the global war on terror.
Earlier this summer, Emmerson, who monitors counter-terrorism for the UN, called for effective investigations into drone attacks. Some US drone strikes in Pakistan – where those helping victims of earlier attacks or attending funerals were killed – may amount to war crimes, Emmerson warned.
In his Harvard speech, he revealed: “If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms … then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act.
“Together with my colleague Christof Heyns, [the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings], I will be launching an investigation unit within the special procedures of the [UN] Human Rights Council to inquire into individual drone attacks.”
The unit will also look at “other forms of targeted killing conducted in counter-terrorism operations, in which it is alleged that civilian casualties have been inflicted, and to seek explanations from the states using this technology and the states on whose territory it is used. [It] will begin its work early next year and will be based in Geneva.”
Security officials who took part in waterboarding interrogations or secret rendition removals should be made accountable for their actions and justice, Emmerson added.
“The time has come,” he said, “for the international community to agree minimum standard principles for investigating such allegations and holding those responsible to account.
“Let us be clear on this: secret detention is unlawful as a matter of international law. Waterboarding is always torture. Torture is an international crime of universal jurisdiction. The torturer, like the pirate before him, is regarded in international law as the enemy of all mankind. There is therefore a duty on states to investigate and to prosecute acts of torture.”
The US stance of conducting counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaida or other groups anywhere in the world because it is deemed to be an international conflict was indefensible, he maintained.
“The global war paradigm has done immense damage to a previously shared international consensus on the legal framework underlying both international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” Emmerson said. “It has also given a spurious justification to a range of serious human rights and humanitarian law violations.
“The [global] war paradigm was always based on the flimsiest of reasoning, and was not supported even by close allies of the US. The first-term Obama administration initially retreated from this approach, but over the past 18 months it has begun to rear its head once again, in briefings by administration officials seeking to provide a legal justification for the drone programme of targeted killing in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia …
“[It is] alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns … has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.”
Emmerson singled out both President Obama and the Republican challenger Mitt Romney for criticism. “It is perhaps surprising that the position of the two candidates on this issue has not even featured during their presidential elections campaigns, and got no mention at all in Monday night’s foreign policy debate.
“We now know that the two candidates are in agreement on the use of drones. But the issue of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is an one which, according to the record, continues to divide them.
“I should make it absolutely clear that my mandate does not see to eye to eye with the Obama administration on a range of issues – not least the lack of transparency over the drone programme. But on this issue the president has been clear since he took office that water-boarding is torture that it is contrary to American values and that it would stop.
“… But Governor Romney has said that he does not believe that waterboarding is torture. He has said that he would allow enhanced interrogation techniques that go beyond those now permitted by the army field manual, and his security advisers have recommended that he rescind the existing restrictions.”
The Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, he pointed out, used the technique. “Anyone who is in doubt about whether waterboarding is torture should visit Tuol Sleng, the infamous S-21 detention facility operated by the Khymer Rouge in Phnom Penh.
“Over a period of four years 14,000 people were systematically tortured and killed there. It is now a genocide museum. And right there, in the middle of the central torturing room, is the apparatus used by Pol Pot’s security officials for waterboarding.”
http://www.esquire.com/features/obama-lethal-presidency-0812
———————————————————————————–
I saw Obama a few times on the 39th floor at 230 South Dearborn in Chicago. I’m beginning to think I don’t trust him. I don’t trust Hillary Clinton either.
Just get your fossil fuel at home. Do you know that gasoline prices have been dropping recently? It’s down by about 50 cents a gallon.
Maybe you should ask Monicka Lewinsky about the stain on her dress.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/aclu-asking-federal-government-how-its-using-drones-inside-us
Glenn Greenwald (link above):
“But even more significant is the truly radical vision of government in which this is all grounded. The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment to the constitution: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power, being honored.
And yet what the Post is describing, what we have had for years, is a system of government that – without hyperbole – is the very antithesis of that liberty. It is literally impossible to imagine a more violent repudiation of the basic blueprint of the republic than the development of a secretive, totally unaccountable executive branch agency that simultaneously collects information about all citizens and then applies a “disposition matrix” to determine what punishment should be meted out. This is classic political dystopia brought to reality (despite how compelled such a conclusion is by these indisputable facts, many Americans will view such a claim as an exaggeration, paranoia, or worse because of this psychological dynamic I described here which leads many good passive westerners to believe that true oppression, by definition, is something that happens only elsewhere).
In response to the Post story, Chris Hayes asked: “If you have a ‘kill list’, but the list keeps growing, are you succeeding?” The answer all depends upon what the objective is.”
Repeating:
“The core guarantee of western justice since the Magna Carta was codified in the US by the fifth amendment to the constitution: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” You simply cannot have a free society, a worthwhile political system, without that guarantee, that constraint on the ultimate abusive state power, being honored.”
We’re no longer “a free society.” Fact.
Thanks for posting the WP article, Gene H.
“Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent”
“Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism – ‘disposition matrix’ – the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a government can claim”
by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list
The Biggest New Spying Program You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
By Chris Calabrese, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:18pm
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/biggest-new-spying-program-youve-probably-never-heard
Hardly a self-fulfilling prophecy. The conflict is there whether or not we use precision attacks. Continue the hunt!
Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists
By Greg Miller,
“Why I’m Going to Pakistan: Under Scrutiny, the Drone Strike Policy Will Fall”
Sunday, 30 September 2012 11:29 By Robert Naiman, Truthout
http://truth-out.org/news/item/11857-why-im-going-to-pakistan-under-scrutiny-the-drone-strike-policy-will-fall
“US drone strikes in Pakistan have helped turn the Pakistani public against the United States. Three quarters of Pakistanis now consider the United States to be an enemy. Only 13% of Pakistanis think relations with the U.S. have improved in recent years; four-in-ten believe that US economic and military aid is having a negative impact on Pakistan, while only about one-in-ten think the impact is positive. Only 17% back U.S. drone strikes, even if they are conducted in conjunction with the Pakistani government.”
Matt Johnso
You said,”Wait until the Chinese stop buying our bonds. What do you think they’re preparing for? This country better stop destroying its manufacturing base.”
I have often thought that if we ever go to war with China, we would need to declare a truce periodically so the war-monger industries could take delivery of cheap Chinese parts for the planes, guns, humvees, plastic handcuffs, black hoods, water boards, and other war materials they make. They have to keep their profit margins up, don’tcha know. They’re the job creators, don’tcha know. They have to take care of our brave boys overseas, don’tcha know. It’s their patriotic duty, don’tcha know.
DifferentDog-
Regarding your complaint about censorship here (Sept.30,,9:04 am), you said,”Better to censor really crude words like Cheney”. I agree. I recently wrote a comment on a Yahoo! News story and mentioned Dick Cheney. Yahoo! News censored the word “Dick”. I thought that was hilarious.
I hear too many people waffling on this most important issue and kudos to those who haven’t. I would suggest that those who think this policy is a useful one read Esquire’s article. It is long and a bit jumbled, but it is also an intellectually measured indictment. I have had lots of reactions from Liberals and Dems that lead to understanding them as unwilling to face reality if it criticizes Obama. The link: http://www.esquire.com/features/obama-lethal-presidency-0812
Elaine M. 1, September 30, 2012 at 8:43 am
“But that wasn’t the case here,” interrupted retired colonel Jack Jacobs. “You’re talking about a targeted person here.” Scahill continued:
“If you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded clusterbombs and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do–the women and children that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen–those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area. There’s only one person that’s been identified that had any connection to Al Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S. tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It’s murder–it’s mass murder–when you say, ‘We are going to bomb this area’ because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are there. I’m sorry, that’s murder.”
=======
Stay out of that part of the world. If you want to buy their oil, apparently you have to kill them. That includes women and children. Stop buying their oil. Leave them to rot. They have nothing without oil.