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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Military violence that is smoothly regulated by laws that spare civilians -- is usually a sick joke

the post title is taken from a tomdispatch post authored by chase madar who has recently published a book on the ongoing case of bradley manning entitled, The Passion of Bradley Manning...

What the Laws of War Allow
Do the WikiLeaks War Logs Reveal War Crimes -- Or the Poverty of International Law?

[...]

“International humanitarian law,” or IHL, is the trying-too-hard euphemism for the laws of war. And as it happens, IHL turns out to be less concerned with restraining military violence than licensing it. As applied to America’s recent wars, this body of law turns out to be wonderfully accommodating when it comes to the prerogatives of an occupying army.

[...]

Here is where the WikiLeaks disclosures were so revealing. They remind us, once again, that the humanitarian dream of “clean warfare” -- military violence that is smoothly regulated by laws that spare civilians -- is usually a sick joke. We need to wean ourselves from the false comfort that the law is always on the side of civilians. We need to scrap our tendency to assume that international law is inherently virtuous, and that anything that shocks our conscience -- that helicopter video or widespread torture in Iraq under the noses of U.S. soldiers -- must be a violation of this system, rather than its logical and predictable consequence.

[...]

Who, after all, writes the laws of war? Just as the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical and airline industries are often gamed by large corporations with their phalanxes of lobbyists, the laws of war are also vulnerable to “regulatory capture” by the great powers under their supposed rule. Keep in mind, for instance, that the Pentagon employs 10,000 lawyers and that its junior partner in foreign policy making, the State Department, has a few hundred more. Should we be surprised if in-house lawyers can sort out “legal” ways not to let those laws of war get in the way of the global ambitions of a superpower?

[...]

[Bradley Manning] saw very clearly what so many professors and generals take pains to deny: that the primary function of the laws of war is not to restrain violence, but to justify it, often with the greatest lawyerly ingenuity.

it's a cold splash of water for me to grasp the very obvious truth that "the laws of war are also vulnerable to 'regulatory capture' by the great powers under their supposed rule"...

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Mike Gravel is embarrassed by his country; what the U.S. is doing is immoral

and, i would have to say, rightly so...

from rt...



courtesy of information clearing house...

The US is like a drunkard who charges to war with anyone who might pose a threat, ex-Senator and former US presidential candidate Mike Gravel says.

­“I like the US. But at the same time I think my country is an imperial country that is going downhill, and our leadership does not even acknowledge the problem,” confesses Gravel.

somewhere along the line, this guy had an epiphany... i'd be really interested in hearing him talk about that...

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Gaza, right on the Mediterranean, has to buy imported fish

and our pompous, navel-gazing news media continues to ignore the human rights disaster perpetrated by israel's genocidal policies that continues day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year in palestine and gaza...

Under a sea blockade, the coastal Gaza Strip has now become a seafood importer. Its desperate fishermen — cut off from plentiful fishing grounds by Israeli patrol boats — have turned to sneaking into Egyptian waters in tiny motorboats to buy their catch and bring it home.

Others bring in fish by land, in ice-packed plastic foam boxes pulled through smuggling tunnels from Egypt. And even though the Mediterranean is right on Gaza's doorstep, locals are creating fish ponds to provide Gaza's 1.5 million people their key source of protein.

patético...

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Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Prosecute Bush For Torture

of all the keith olbermann special comments, most of which have been critical statements of truth, fact and relevance, this is perhaps the most important one of all... we simply cannot allow wholesale flouting of the rule of law, the concerted undermining of our country's constitution, and the violation of every human value known to man to pass without demanding public accountability and due process... the u.s. and the world simply cannot afford to let criminals of this magnitude render such flagrant disservice to our ideals and values and then pass quietly into history unchallenged...



olbermann's diary in daily kos...

Submitted this of all evenings, from this of all places, with the respect and hope due any President-Elect on the eve of his or her inauguration (but particularly this one), I am agreeing with Mr. Obama when he told George Stephanopoulos: "What we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

That perspective, looking ahead and not back, makes more imperative still the prosecution of those who tortured -- and those who authorized torture -- in your name, in my name, in Barack Obama's name.

As the spontaneous chants of "Yes We Can" waft in to the cramped MSNBC trailer on the Mall (just morphing now into "Yes We Did") we have a metaphor for what the President-Elect needs to accomplish in this vital area.

I also defer to the President-Elect when he shows, as he did today and will likely express in his address tomorrow, that while we celebrate our liberation this week, we must simultaneously continue to work -- to work right now -- for what is right. The prosecution of torture might not have to be the first priority; it might not have to be a sweeping event consuming the nation, but we must have a catharsis.

Most importantly, the great and tragic events of our history have proven that the failure to achieve such a catharsis, the failure to atone, has its own tragic, long-range consequences.

From tonight's piece:

In point of fact, every effort to merely 'draw a line in the sand' and declare the past dead, has only served to keep the past alive -- and often to strengthen it.

We compromised with slavery in the Declaration of Independence --and four score and nine years later we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers in a Civil War.

After that War's ending, we compromised with the social restructuring and protection of the rights of minorities in the South. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in the cities of the South.

We compromised with Germany and the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War -- nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted War Crimes trials, and 19 years later there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.

We compromised with the Trusts of the early 1900's, and today we have corporations too big to let fail.

We compromised with The Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism, and we compromised with McCarthyism and got Watergate, and we compromised with Watergate and the junior members of the Ford Administration realized how little was ultimately at risk, and grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

We cannot compromise again.

And of paramount importance, whether the outcome of torture prosecutions is imprisonment or just an asterisk to history, their pursuit alone is the difference between this nation saying "no, our elected leaders were wrong," and it deferring to George W. Bush's vision that torture was legal, and effective, and saved the country.

amen...

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Don't Pinch Me...........

.........I don't wanna be woke up.

I'm having sweet dreams, courtesy of NewsMax, no less.


Obama May Bring Criminal Charges Against Bush

Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden said he and presidential hopeful Barack Obama could bring criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.

“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued,” Biden said during a campaign stop in Florida on Monday, ABC News reported.

“Not out of vengeance, not out of retribution. Out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president — no one is above the law.”

Biden promised that an Obama-Biden government would go through Bush administration data with "a fine-toothed comb" and pursue criminal charges if necessary.

Now, if they will only dig into the back of their closets, and find the backbones they misplaced so long ago, and keep their word this time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know..............but cut me some slack. I said I was dreamin'.

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