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...

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.”

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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...

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Violence, violence, and more violence permeates our daily lives

david sirota offers up a very thoughtful piece on the violent culture of the united states in today's alternet...

Today, one in every three dollars the government spends goes to defense and security. The killing machine and adventurism that money manufactures has delivered 1 million Iraqi casualties, thousands of American casualties and an implicit promise of future wars -- indeed, of permanent war.

Perpetuating this expenditure, bloodshed and posture in a nation of dwindling resources, humanitarian self-images and anti-interventionist impulses requires a culture constantly selling violence as a necessity. It's not just video games -- it's the nightly news echoing Pentagon propaganda and "hawkish" politicians equating militarism with patriotism and "embedded" journalism cheering on wars and every other suit-and-tie-clad industry constantly forwarding the assumption that killing is a legitimate form of national ambition and self-expression. Is it any wonder that a few crazies apply that ethos to their individual lives, and begin seeing violence as a reasonable means to express their own emotions?

i was moved to respond...

Although, I must say, I completely agree with your assessment. Our national culture is totally constructed on exploitation - of people, of resources, of the planet - and exploitation is inextricably tied to violence. But it's not only the deeper questions about people turning to violence that our superficiality-obsessed society avoids, it is ANY deeper discussion about ANYTHING.

I teach a graduate seminar in leadership and one of the things I say to the students right off the bat is that the corpus of writings on leadership that leap off the shelves at the unwary consumer in every bookstore in the country are nothing more than fast-food recipes containing little in the way of nutritional ingredients and probably not much more in the way of anything natural whatsoever.

What is the level of national discussion about sex? Janet Jackson's nipple? Sarah Palin's daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy? There's no "discussion" to be had, merely more titillation.

The recent national obsession with the shooting of the three Somalian pirates was nothing more than violence pornography. The lede in Jonah Goldberg's LA Times editorial was this: "Shooting three Somali pirates was a good start. Now let's shoot some more." Unbelievable or, rather, perhaps TOO believable.

I am typing this as I sit at my desk in Kabul, Afghanistan, the current epicenter of violence, at least from the perspective of our violence-besotted media. But even my Afghan colleagues, inured as they are to violence on a daily basis, scratch their heads over the violent episodes they read about in the U.S. The U.S. is the penultimate, they reason. Why in the world would people there engage in such behavior?

Why indeed.

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Our neo-con, macho asshole problem

after reading the headline and the lede, i didn't have the stomach to read the rest...

How to solve the pirate problem

By Jonah Goldberg

Shooting three Somali pirates was a good start. Now let's shoot some more.

jerk...

could someone please explain to me how killing people is the solution to our problems...? i'm afraid the connection escapes me...

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The REAL truth about the U.S. in Ethiopia and Somalia... Yes, it's about OIL and a "narrow, extremely violent kleptocracy"...

this is perhaps the best analysis i've read yet of what's going on in africa...

from the media alerts section of medialens...

On May 1, the BBC website reported an attack on Somalia with the words:

“Air raid kills Somali militants.”

One might think the BBC’s headline would identify the agency responsible for the bombing, but the first few sentences also shed no light:

“The leader of the military wing of an Islamist insurgent organisation in Somalia has been killed in an overnight air strike.

“Aden Hashi Ayro, al-Shabab's military commander, died when his home in the central town of Dusamareb was bombed.

“Ten other people, including a senior militant, are also reported dead.”

[...]

[T]he US is the world’s policeman; no need to mention it by name. The action of bombing an impoverished Third World country already indicates the agent. This also helps explain why no mention was made of the illegality of this act of aggression.

ok, now, let's get down to brass tacks...

The preferred media framework for making sense of US actions closely parallels cold war mythology. We are to believe the US is passionately, even blindly, battling ideological enemies in an effort to protect itself and the West.

[...]

As Andy Rowell and James Marriott have noted, the key fact is that “some 30 per cent of America's oil will come from Africa in the next ten years". (Rowell and Marriott, A Game as Old as Empire - The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption, edited by Steven Hiatt, Berrett-Koehler, 2007, p.118)

The US has plans for nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields to be allocated to the US oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips. The US hopes Somalia will line up as an ally alongside Ethiopia and Djibouti, where the US has a military base. This alliance would give America powerful leverage close to the major energy-producing regions.

[...]

[W]e are [only] free to chose from parties and leaders who all represent the same interests of concentrated state-corporate power - the tiny fraction of the population that owns much of the country and runs its business.

Crucially, ’our leaders’ front a political system that has an overwhelming advantage in high-tech military power. They are all too willing to use this power to convulse countries with bloodshed when doing so supports their lucrative version of economic ’order’. Iraq is the obvious example - Somalia is another.

’Our leaders’ rule in the name of democracy, but they act in the interests of a narrow, extremely violent kleptocracy.

excellent stuff... i encourage you to read it all...

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What if Ethiopia wanted to buy arms from Iran rather than North Korea?

W.T.F...?

Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.

The United States allowed the arms delivery to go through in January in part because Ethiopia was in the midst of a military offensive against Islamic militias inside Somalia, a campaign that aided the American policy of combating religious extremists in the Horn of Africa.

and so, what are we supposed to do when we read this...? say, oh, ok... makes perfectly good sense to me... never mind that "axis of evil" crap that's been shoved down our throats for years... i mean the bush administration has to have a little flexibility, now doesn't it...?

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