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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
there's a lot of very disturbing stuff going on out there but i think targeted killing and extrajudicial assassinations are right at the top of the list...
This video from the American Civil Liberties Union condemns the U.S. government practice of issuing death sentences without due process as part of its targeted killing policy. "Targeted Killing" is being released to coincide with the filing today of an unprecedented lawsuit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) challenging the government's asserted authority to use lethal force against U.S. citizens located far from any battlefield without judicial process, and without disclosing the standards it uses to target individuals for death.
What I've found most disturbing about this controversy from the start is how many Americans are willing to blindly believe the Government's accusations of Terrorism against their fellow citizens -- provided they're Muslims with foreign-sounding names -- without needing to see any evidence at all. All government officials have to do is anonymously leak to the media extremely vague accusations against someone without any evidence presented (Awlaki is involved in multiple plots!!), and a substantial number of people will then immediately run around yelling: Kill that Terrorist!!
It's an authoritarian scene out of some near-future dystopian novel, yet it's exactly what is happening. This is precisely the reaction of a substantial portion of the population which has been trained to believe every unproven government accusation of Terrorism. The mere utterance of the accusation -- Terrorist -- sends them into mindless, fear-driven submission, so extreme that they're willing even to endorse a Presidential-imposed death penalty on American citizens with no due process: about the most tyrannical power that can be imagined, literally. The fact that this very same Government is continuously and repeatedly wrong when it makes those accusations does not seem to be even a cause for hesitation among this faction. They just keep dutifully reciting the ultimate authoritarian anthem: if my Government says it, it must be true, and I don't need to see any evidence or indulge any of this bothersome process stuff -- trials and courts or whatever -- before punishment is meted out, including the death penalty.
So now Barack Obama is being sued by an American citizen who is forced to plead with a court to protect him from due-process-free, state-sanctioned murder. There are multiple reasons why this lawsuit may not succeed, beginning with the demonstrated reluctance of federal judges to "interfere with" war-related decisions of the President, particularly when the specter of Terrorism is raised. The power-revering factions on the Right have joined with some Democratic loyalists who are comfortable with any power now that their Party controls the White House. But if the Obama administration succeeds in vesting itself with the power to order American citizens killed far from any battlefield, with no evidence of violent resistance to arrest and no due process whatsoever to contest the accusations, that is a power that will endure with future Presidents as well.
as usually happens when i'm engaged with non-u.s. citizens during my many travels, i get the opportunity to hear what they think about current events and i'm particularly interested in hearing what they think about my country from their respective vantage points... it isn't in the least bit comforting to hear them worrying about what kind of message the u.s. is sending to the budding despots in their own countries who justify increasingly harsh measures by saying, "well, the u.s. does it, why shouldn't we...?"
the u.s. dearly loves to paint itself as the positive role model for the rest of the world but seems to be very nearly blind, either through ignorance or by choice, to just how true that is as well as to the fact that, throughout the history of humankind, actions ALWAYS speak louder than words...
Here's a story presented as a "gee-whiz" technology piece that should make your blood run cold
Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times
imagine looking up and seeing one of these circling your neighborhood... imagine knowing what it can do... imagine living with that kind of terror day in and day out...
this article reminds me of the public-service ads praising the brave men and women who proudly defend our country using only the very latest technology selflessly dished up by our glorious defense establishment that you'd see on tv in the late 50s and early 60s... what it really is, of course, is a continuing glorification of death and destruction, only rendered more horrifyingly anonymous with the shift to hapless paid assassins raining death from the skies as they sit comfortably in barcaloungers in the nevada desert many thousands of miles from their victims... then, after a hard day at the "office," they go home to the wife and kids for dinner and a night in front of the tv...
The Pentagon is preparing to graduate its first pilots of unmanned drones from the elite U.S. Air Force Weapons School -- a version of the Navy's Top Gun program -- in a bid to elevate the skills and status of the officers who fly Predators, one of the military's fastest growing aircraft programs.
The elite flight schools of the Air Force and Navy are most closely associated with smart, tough fighter jocks. But over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the MQ-1 Predator and more heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper craft have become, to many in the Pentagon, the most important aircraft the U.S. has deployed.
[...]
The Predator and Reaper pilots do their debriefings and classroom work at Nellis with weapons school students specializing in other aircraft. They fly the drones from nearby Creech Air Force Base, the control station used to fly drones in Afghanistan and Iraq.
since we're so hot on this new method of killing and destroying, how about using those new teeny-tiny robot drones to film what happens on the ground and then making that required viewing at the conclusion of each pilot's mission...? maybe watching children screaming and dying, bodies being blasted into raw, bloody bits, and buildings collapsing on and crushing their occupants would bring a better sense of reality to the whole affair...
while we're at it, why not include a slaughter-house photo gallery with each neat, shrink-wrapped package of meat in the supermarket butcher case as a reminder of how it came to be there...?
Photos provided by the U.S. Air Force Inside the U.S. Air Force's Combined Air & Space Operations Center in the Middle East
Each [screen] is about 5 feet wide, displaying remarkably clear live footage from cameras mounted on the Air Force's un-manned Predator drones that buzz incessantly above Iraq and Afghanistan. The Predator drones, however, are not filming a raging firefight, or a bridge about to be strafed from the air.
They are stalking prey.
You see a man, walking through a shrub-dotted, dusty field. A small dog wanders behind him. Another screen shows a group of individuals, standing huddled together on a city street, looking like they could be chatting about a ballgame. A third Predator tracks a figure getting into a car, following as the car snakes through traffic. Yet another screen stays fixated on a single squat house surrounded by what looks like a low cement wall, as if someone is about to emerge from the front door.
The scenes look misleadingly pedestrian. The miniature people on the screens do not know they are being watched. "We are looking for individual people," Lt. Col. Walt Manwill says, as he stares up at the massive screens. "Especially when you are killing people, you want to make sure you do it right." Manwill, a blockish former pilot whose call sign is Fridge, is a chief of combat operations here, on what the Air Force simply calls "the floor." He handles one of three eight-hour shifts in a job that runs 24 hours a day.
Targeters here show me recent footage of two men on the ground in Iraq. The two men, far below the Predator drone's gaze, appear to be setting up a mortar on a city street. They are in the shadow of a building just feet away. Suddenly, the two men explode. Everything around the men, including the buildings, looks unharmed. But when the dust clears, the two men are wiped away. A small bomb, tailor-made for hunting single individuals, has done the job.
besides the nightmarish scene described above in which a duo presumably intent on causing death and destruction are exterminated, seemingly by god himself, we have our u.s. air force coming to realizations like this from the comfort of their air-conditioned operations center...
The Air Force learned the hard way that inadvertently killing and injuring civilians or damaging property is counterproductive to the overall cause. "We went back and looked at our procedures -- how we use air, why we use air and under what circumstances," explains [Col. Gary Crowder, the commander of the operations center]. "We changed the way we do business."
"It's just like a business," agrees Maj. Gen. Maury Forsyth, the deputy commander of Air Force operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Every time you have one unsatisfied customer, you have to have nine satisfied customers to counteract that," he says during an interview in his office. "I'll put it this way: All of the military and political benefits of 10 perfect airstrikes targeting insurgent leaders can be lost in a few seconds by one strike that goes awry and causes civilian casualties."
to complete the absolute horror of this hi-tech operation and the characterization of those ordering the killing as "customers", the targets have even been given a nickname - "bubba"...
The technology the Air Force relies on to kill Bubba, but not his neighbors, is mesmerizing. It also makes the process of killing another human being eerily impersonal.
On the floor, once Bubba is up on the screen, targeting officials can quickly call up satellite images of his location. They have at their fingertips high-fidelity images less than 90 days old of nearly every square foot of Iraq and Afghanistan -- a vast amount of data. By overlaying two images of the same location taken from separate angles, and donning a pair of gray 3-D glasses (I wore a pair), a stunning real-life-looking, 3-D image of Bubba's house appears on a computer screen: There is Bubba's yard, the tree in Bubba's yard and so on. Using a mouse to point and click, a computer quickly determines the size, height and precise location of nearby structures.
to say that i am aghast would be a serious understatement... and, as much as i would like to repress it, another thought crosses my mind... this available and highly-sophisticated technology of instant and impersonal death is on the horizon for domestic use... bet on it...
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