Jeremy Scahill on drone strikes: The most dangerous thing that the U.S. is doing is giving people in Yemen or Somalia, or Pakistan, a non ideological reason to hate the United States
from raw story...
imagine living day-to-day never knowing when death would rain out of the sky on you or your neighbors... imagine how you'd feel if someone from your neighborhood, a friend, a colleague, a casual acquaintance or, god forbid, a member of your family was killed by a drone strike... imagine how you'd feel if you knew that person to be completely innocent, someone just like yourself going about their daily business of working, providing for his or her family, living his or her life... then imagine that happening without any recourse, without any accountability... well, i certainly can't...
Upset over President Barack Obama’s “kill list” and continued usage of drone striking throughout his administration, The Nation‘s national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill called the commander-in-chief’s actions “murderous.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes, Scahill argued for the justification of labeling President Obama’s decisions to authorize the strikes as “murder,” specifically the drone attack on al-Qaeda America figure Anwar Al-Awlaki’s son in Yemen in 2011 recently covered by PBS’ Frontline.
“If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people, and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they’ve murdered those people,” Scahill said.
[...]
"When you say, ‘We’re going to bomb this area because we believe a terrorist is there,’ and you know that women and children are there, [then] the United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe women and children are there. That’s murder.”
Scahill added: “The most dangerous thing that the U.S. is doing, besides murdering innocent people in many cases, is giving people in Yemen or Somalia, or Pakistan, a non ideological reason to hate the United States, to fight the United States. Non-ideological reasons, meaning personal vendetta, is much more powerful than, ‘We hate your freedom, we hate your McDonalds, we hate your Christianity, that’s real to them.”
imagine living day-to-day never knowing when death would rain out of the sky on you or your neighbors... imagine how you'd feel if someone from your neighborhood, a friend, a colleague, a casual acquaintance or, god forbid, a member of your family was killed by a drone strike... imagine how you'd feel if you knew that person to be completely innocent, someone just like yourself going about their daily business of working, providing for his or her family, living his or her life... then imagine that happening without any recourse, without any accountability... well, i certainly can't...
Labels: Al Qaeda, Anwar al-Awlaki, Barack Obama, Chris Hayes, civilian casualties, crimes against humanity, Jeremy Scahill, kill list, military drones, Pakistan, Somalia, terrorism, Yemen
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posted by profmarcus at
6/03/2012
