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Mark: Thanks to all the contributors on this blog. When I want to get information on the events that really matter, I come here.
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Alison: Loquacious as ever with a touch of elegance -- & right on target as usual!
"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
On the campaign trail, Obama promised an end to torture, extraordinary
rendition and secret prisons. But since taking office he has in fact
doubled-down on some of the more insidious policies he inherited from
the Bush administration. As Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill
explains, Obama has surrounded himself with war hawks, relied on
targeted killing and acted unilaterally to defend US interests. Instead
of drawing down the two major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he
has shifted combat to special operations units, prolonging US engagement
and fighting a "dirty" war.
and to think how much i railed against george bush...
Arthur Silber: The State is become death. Our target can be anyone we choose. Yes, this means you. No, there is nowhere to run.
it's been a long time since i've posted anything by arthur silber and, truth be told, i'd forgotten just how articulate and powerful a writer he is... my thanks to chris floyd and information clearing house for re-introducing me to arthur...
In a culture that was healthy to any significant degree, the recent NYT article
about the Obama administration's institutionalized, systematic program
of murder by secret decree would have resulted in a deafening,
sustained, nationwide howl of outrage and denunciation. In a healthy
country -- and here, I use "healthy" in the sense described in an essay from four years ago:
"to designate those goals and motives that can generally be described
as supportive of individual life and happiness" -- the government's
announcement that it regularly murders innocent human beings, wherever
they may be in the world, for any reason the government wishes, and that
the murderers are proud of their murders and plan to continue them indefinitely, would have propelled millions of people into the streets.
[...]
It is one thing for the ruling class to target the general domestic
population on economic matters, as it has by systematically squeezing
every last bit of wealth and opportunity out of "ordinary" Americans and
shoveling all of it into the drooling maw of the rulers (and for many
Americans, these methods of brutalization are already catastrophic in
the extreme). It is very different when the ruling class announces to
the world that it considers every human being on Earth not favored by
power and privilege to be fair game in a neverending campaign of
slaughter.
Yet there are no crowds in the street. Forget howls of fury; you can
listen with the greatest concentration of which you are capable, and you
will detect barely a whimper. Life goes on precisely as before, as if
nothing of great moment has happened.
[...]
These people are monsters. This is profoundly evil.
All these people, all those who collaborate and assist in such a
program, have placed themselves far beyond any limit of what can be
designated as civilization.
it's stunning how far down the hole we've fallen...
Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in
November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States;
you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may
not have been emperors or kings, but they -- and the vast
national-security structure that continues to be built-up and
institutionalized around the presidential self -- are certainly one of
the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against.
They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers
in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow,
recalcitrant, deliberative body.
[...]
It’s not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to
do with or been in any way involved in assassination programs. The
state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history. How could President
John F. Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed
assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice
Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh
Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.) Similarly, during
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried out a massive
assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix.
It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for killing tens of
thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up
in the process.
and now...
Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their
elected representatives, [Barack Obama] alone is now responsible for regular
killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations.
[...]
The founding fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over
safety. They would never have believed that a man surrounded by
advisors and lawyers, left to his own devices, could protect them from
what truly mattered. They tried to guard against it. Now, we have a
government and a presidency dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in
November.
the good news is that this kind of imperial abomination is seeing the light of day and that there are at least a few people who are justifiably outraged and deeply worried about the path our country is on... the bad news is that there are just a few people who are justifiably outraged and deeply worried about the path our country is on...
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
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...
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