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The CIA's Unaccountable Drone War Claims Another Casualty
If Tariq Aziz, the 16-year-old soccer fan I met last week in Pakistan, was a dangerous Taliban terrorist, let the CIA prove it.
Last Friday, I met a boy, just before he was assassinated by the CIA. Tariq Aziz was 16, a quiet young man from North Waziristan, who, like most teenagers, enjoyed soccer. Seventy-two hours later, a Hellfire missile is believed to have killed him as he was traveling in a car to meet his aunt in Miran Shah, to take her home after her wedding. Killed with him was his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan.
Over 2,300 people in Pakistan have been killed by such missiles carried by drone aircraft such as the Predator and the Reaper, and launched by remote control from Langley, Virginia. Tariq and Waheed brought the known total of children killed in this way to 175, according to statistics maintained by the organization I work for, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The final order to kill is signed allegedly by Stephen Preston, the general counsel at the CIA headquarters. What evidence, I would like to know, does Mr Preston have against Tariq and Waheed? What right does he have to act as judge, jury and executioner of two teenage boys neither he nor his staff have ever met, let alone cross-examined, or given the opportunity to present witnesses?
It is not too late to call for a prosecution and trial of whoever pushed the button and the US government officials who gave the order: that is, Mr Preston and his boss, President Barack Obama.
There are many people whom I know who can appear as witnesses in this trial. We – a pair of reporters, together with several lawyers from Britain, Pakistan and the US – met the victim and dozens of other young men from North Waziristan for dinner at the Margalla hotel in Islamabad on Thursday 27 October. We talked about their local soccer teams, which they proudly related were named for Brazil, New Zealand and other nations, which they had heard about but never visited.
The next morning, I filmed young Tariq walking into a conference hall to greet his elders. I reviewed the tape after he was killed to see what was recorded of some of his last moments: he walks shyly and greets the Waziri elders in the traditional style by briefly touching their chests. With his friends, he walks to a set of chairs towards the back of the hall, and they argue briefly about where each of them will sit. Over the course of the morning, Tariq appears again in many photographs that dozens of those present took, always sitting quietly and listening intently.
Tariq was attending a "Waziristan Grand Jirga" on behalf of drone strike victims in Pakistan, which was held at the Margalla hotel the following day. As is the Pashtun custom, the young men, each of whom had lost a friend or relative in a drone strike, did not speak. For four hours, the Waziri elders debated the drone war, and then they listened to a resolution condemning the attacks, read out by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a lawyer from the Foundation for Fundamental Rights. The group voted for this unanimously.
Neil Williams, a volunteer from Reprieve, the British legal charity, sat down and chatted with Tariq after the jirga was over. Together, they traveled in a van to the Pakistani parliament for a protest rally against drone strikes led by Imran Khan, a former cricketer, and now the leader of the Tehreek-e-Insaaf political party.
The next day, the group returned home to Waziristan. On Monday, Tariq was killed, according to his uncle Noor Kalam.
The question I would pose to the jury is this: would a terrorist suspect come to a public meeting and converse openly with foreign lawyers and reporters, and allow himself to be photographed and interviewed? More importantly, since he was so easily available, why could Tariq not have been detained in Islamabad, when we spent 48 hours together? Neither Tariz Aziz nor the lawyers attending this meeting had a highly trained private security detail that could have put up resistance.
Attending that jirga, however, were Clive Stafford Smith and Tara Murray, two US lawyers who trained at Columbia and Harvard. They tell me, unequivocally, that US law is based on the fact that every person is innocent until proven guilty. Why was Tariq, even if a terrorist suspect, not offered an opportunity to defend himself?
Let me offer important alternative argument – the US government has a record of making terrible mistakes in this covert war. On 2 September 2010, the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan claimed to have killed Muhammad Amin, the alleged Taliban deputy governor of Takhar province in Afghanistan, in a drone strike. There was only one problem: Michael Semple, a Taliban expert at Harvard University, subsequently interviewed Muhammad Amin and confirmed that he was alive and well and living in Pakistan in March 2011.
The man who was killed was Zabet Amanullah, who was out campaigning in parliamentary elections – along with nine of his fellow election workers. This was confirmed by exhaustive research conducted by Kate Clark, a former BBC correspondent in Kabul who now works for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who had met with Zabet Amanullah in 2008. The error could have been avoided, Clark points out in her report, if US military intelligence officers had just been "watching election coverage on television", instead of living in its "parallel world" remote from "normal, everyday world of Afghan politics".
If Barack Obama's CIA believed in justice and judicial process, they could have attended the Islamabad jirga last Friday and met with Tariq. It was, after all, an open meeting. They could have arrested and charged Tariq with the help of the Pakistani police. If a prosecution is ever mounted over the death of Tariq, those of us who met him on several occasions last week would be happy to testify to the character of the young man that we had met. But if the CIA has evidence to the contrary, it should present it to the world.
Unless the CIA can prove that Tariq Aziz posed an imminent threat (as the White House's legal advice stipulates a targeted killing must in order for an attack to be carried out), or that he was a key planner in a war against the US or Pakistan, the killing of this 16 year old was murder, and any jury should convict the CIA accordingly.
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Show AllDRONES: The ultimate in inhuman evil. These are not even robots killing living humans, which would be bad enough.
These killers are murdering other human beings in a video game.
A perfect symbol for what our entire society has become.
The banality of evil? Not even.
The celebration of the facility and ingenuity of evil.
Constitutional law expert Obama and his supporters have blood on their hands and all the way up their arms.
I no longer know what to think or believe when someone asks if I am an American. I know that technically that is the nationality which is ascribed to my name and statistical identity, but I can no longer go on aligning, connecting, or associating myself whatsoever with the actions of this country or society, at least insomuch as official policy is concerned.
I'm proud to be what I was raised to believe was an American. I am proud to believe in and still support many of the values that I associated with America, and which were featured prominently in much of the founding rhetoric of our nation, or 'experiment in nationhood', as it were, since we're no longer really a 'nation', but a bloody corporate empire of course.
What does being 'America' even mean at this time in history?
I have a hard time even understanding what national identity even means anymore, with the notions of national sovereignty so disintegrated in this global era of corporate dominance. Listen for this: The words 'country' and 'company' lately have been subconsciously conflated... I hear that Freudian slip-up all the time, where someone says 'company', when they meant 'country'.
I think there are no real countries anymore, just multinational conglomerated interests, squabbling in a chaotic and greedy struggle, given cover by a political process which is meant to mask and facilitate their malfeasance. Political policy is simply reduced to a self-destructive process of moneyed interests hijacking, privatizing and deregulating public goods and assets, which gives cover to the messy wars for stuff, while the public is neutralized from being able to effect any legitimate response.
As far as I'm concerned, this 'thing' that has become America, no longer represents or is 'We The People', which I consider myself a member of... because there is no longer any democratic oversight of our military or fiscal policies, I have no choice to conclude that if the Duopoly is America, than I no longer can call myself the same. All true Americans are adrift without a true nation, with only a cadre of liars, betrayers and usurpers at the helm.
Some people drew some lines on a map. Some people live inside certain lines. Some other people were born inside certain other lines. Some people of each group have declared themselves to be "leaders" of all others inside of their respective lines. The "leaders" have convinced and cajoled by various means including imposed and designed poverty, false ideals of "patriotism" and "nationalism", etc., some of the people living inside their respective lines to become "soldiers" that must when ordered go and kill people living inside of other drawn lines. Usually the orders for the killings are intended to enable the plundering of resources that do not exist inside of their own lines. This is called "geopolitics". The people living inside any given line are to be convinced that they must hate other people living inside other lines. All of this is supposed to make some kind of logical sense. Although we all are truly of the same extended family we have allowed psychopathologically deranged people to become our "leaders" and we agree to go and kill our brothers and sisters. It is baffling.
Unfortunately, there aren't many opportunities offered to officially state on a line asking for national identity: "Terran", otherwise that's what I'd put. I also don't get to vote for the 'Friendly Primate' Party, over the 'Paranoid Aggressive Primate' Party.
Certain members (a majority it would seem) of our species don't seem to appreciate, or care at all for others of us calling ourselves what we actually are. Somehow they also always end up in charge. Why is that?
I'd say, its the 'smart primates' who generally end up just as more servants to the 'clever, crafty (i.e. mendacious/ambitious/ruthless) primates', The angry aggressive monkeys rule both our parties... and politics itself is just another primate posturing show, meant to praise whatever the alpha decides is justified behavior, based on his own interests.
Time for the smart primates to wise up, and get a little clever themselves.
"For more on this, in video format:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
So again I ask... Drones: Right For Humanity?
For years the War Dept. grew and grew because it was needed to defend us against a very scary monster, the USSR. When that monster went away the War Dept needed a new reason to keep spending all that tax money and throwing all that power around. They came up with a list of replacement monster countries, but it was hard to find one that was as scary as the good old USSR had been. Instead of declaring war against a place, they declared war against something that can be any place, and the War on Terror won the prize! Now the monster will live forever because all they need to do is blow people up and the monster gets bigger. And the War Dept is way better at blowing people up than the monster is. And the War Dept gets to make up the rules about who the monster is. You might get to be the monster that your tax money pays them to protect you against! The moral of the story is ...OCCUPY EARTH
And in the end, the monster became US.
And I wholly agree, the moral -is- OCCUPY EARTH.... NOW!
Occupy it with all our strength and conviction; with our belief in justice for all people, for all the species that share the planet with us, and finally, justice for the Earth itself, without which the rest is meaningless.
Peace!
Privatization is THEFT!
Deregulation is CORRUPTION!
Globalization is CULTURAL SUBJUGATION!
One has to wonder, how long before these drones start to target and murder so called " dangerous terrorists " here in Americastan! That is why the murders of so many innocents in Pakistan and Afghanistan must be stopped and the Commander in Chief war criminal, Obama should be tried for war crimes....but we all know that is just wishful thinking!.
The drones are already here on our southern border. They are ready and it is only a matter of time.......
I am sure it is possible, but I think it is not likely unless, for example, some group of criminals or activists were charged with a serious crime and then the government, before the drone hit, would soften up the public by painting a picture of real desperados as bad as devils; and the American public would then gladly cry for blood, and it would initiate a new era- a kind of Cyber Age Circus Maximus, without the arena: the arena being the sky, and the Earth below it.
And in this national spectacle, or sport, the government dresses up in a flight suit with a codpiece, and takes on the role of Zeus, loaded for al-Bear with thunderbolts. People on the ground are picked out for death and targeted by the gamer- I mean, the government "pilot". His fingers are on the button: the R button, S, Y, X, C, and Z buttons. Why, it's as if he has done this all his life.
.
I could see it happening, here overhead, but don't think it will, not soon, not as long as it is so much more politically acceptable to take out people outside our borders, who don't usually have any American relatives or friends, who are almost always poor, who maybe never even heard of 9/11. Doesn't matter.
The wars, and the drone war part of them- none of it really has has anything to do with terrorism, except to continue it, and be the best at it.
The wars were never seriously meant to stop terrorism, although some people were deluded about that.
But the real movers and shakers? They are not so stupid.
It was cynical, and in my opinion, treasonous, from the get-go, and that is true no matter which conspiracy theory- cave dwellers or false flag attack- that we chose to believe.
But the profit motive- basically it's one of those unmentionable things that we are not supposed to be told, and not supposed to know.
The point of the drone campaign may be partly to terrorize us at home, as well as the rest of the world, but I think the main point is like this:
When a car salesman sells a car and it gets wrecked, the owner may come right back, and with the insurance money replace the car. In fact, the car dealer has an interest in seeing it wrecked.
Well, with missiles, our taxes and the rapidly disappearing U.S. Treasury are the insurance, the drones are the car, and the MIC is the salesman, and if you can't keep items moving, factories slow down or close, people get laid off; if you can't make continuing sales of whatever widget your company makes, even if it happens to be a Predator widget or a Hellfire widget, well, there goes the paycheck, there goes the boat, there goes the house payment.
And so, people continue to fool themselves, from lowly investors to the CEOs of arms corporations and the many people in the Pentagon whose job depends on continuing war- the end result is the Juggernaut we've got.
Many people say they want to stop the Juggernaut, but no one can, or will, stop it, always offering some excuse to justify more slaughter; because every time a drone goes out, checks come in:hundreds of thousands of dollars go from U.S. public funds into private accounts of coroporations and individuals.
It's a part of the biggest heist in history- literally; and to watch it is like watching a loved one bleed to death, as it goes on day after day with no stop to it, and a country of people in mass denial.
But as long as business is good, why stop?
The intent all along was to fight the Hydra of old myth, and even to seek it out on purpose, because of the very qualities that make it such a fearsome opponent: every arm cut off the Hydra is replaced by nine new ones.
Similarly, every "insurgent" or whatever- I call them "human beings"- that is murdered by a drone or other U.S. weapon ensures, more or less, that nine new weapons will be needed in the future, for the Hydra's might increases when wounded, and the cries of the wounded Hydra are music to the ears of the arms makers. For when the Hydra moans, they know business will continue to be good.
It is beyond obscene, beyond unlawful, beyond inhumane, beyond shameful, beyond blasphemous. Blasphemy is relevant because certain religions are playing a big part in the crusades against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries. Although it is not supposed to be a "war against Islam", try convincing Muslims of that, after what has been done- almost exclusively to Muslims- by people who, for the most part, claim to be Christian.
The profit motive is, I think, the real engine that keeps the wars going.The ones involved in it are not just the fat cats, but many citizens who live in towns dependent on MIC business; people whose financial life is intimately bound to MIC money.
Americans need to wake up and understand that the control of the U.S. government, and therefore control of the U.S. aremed forces, has been taken over, in steps but rather quickly nonetheless, by the most brazen, psychopathic, clever, ruthless, and treacherous bunch of criminals of my lifetime, and probably of the whole history of the United States.
It's like trying to imagine if the Mafia actually took over the White House or Congress or the Court, but they were so slick about it that we didn't notice, and one day everyone woke up and there was no more democracy and no more republic.
That is just an unbelievable scenario to most citizens, and their only rationale is "Oh, our government wouldn't ever do anything like that!"- sheer blind faith, despite all kinds of vidence about what the government has been doing as it has spiralled out of our control post-9/11.
Americans think they are smart enough to know who killed Nicole Simpson or Michael Jackson or Caylee Anthony, but aren't smart enough to realize it when two huge skyscrapers are blown to kingdom come in front of their eyes. It would be hilarious, were it not so tragic .See: C.S. Lewis > Narnia Books> the "Monopods" a.k.a. "Dufflepuds", to read a humorous and accurate description of this type of mentality and slavish obedience.
Of course, even if were totally confirmed beyond doubt that the government was in fact being run by a criminal group which makes the Mafia look like nothing, chances are that the video channels and message boards would still be full of people cheering it, saying "America f*** YEAH! ! Mafia PWNS our government, only even better! AWEsome D00D!"
Perhaps there is no hope, but I keep looking for the awake people and once in a while find one.
"The profit motive." Spot on.
i urge everyone to at least drop by your local Occupy site or honk when you pass it or donate. if you have more time, please do drop by and contribute your wonderful selves.
ICC, put out a warrant for Obama's arrest.
He's a US citizen and you can't take a US citizen to the ICC without the UN Security Council recommending it.
The Hague Invasion Act.
google it.
Unfortunately our politicians have no intention of playing by the rules, because in their eyes - "Might is right", we simply save the war crimes trials for the hapless people who get in our way. When was the last time a member of a winning army stood trial for war crimes?
when was the last time the US was the winning army?
Grenada?
Panama?
This article troubles me, because it implies that if the drone-strike victims were "combatants", it would have been all right - as if the US has an unquestionable right to invade and/or commit violence on the peoples in these lands to begin with.
The irony is that most of these so-called militants or combatants are people who took up arms against the invading Americans after one of their loved ones was killed by a drone!
Pratap Chatterjee does not imply that it's okay to target "combatants" in Pakistan with drones. He argues that the killing of 16-year-old Tariq Aziz is such a clear-cut instance of senseless violence - unjustifiable even under the paper-thin pretexts of our endless lawless war - that those responsible need to be charged with murder.
Along the way, Chatterjee sketches a word-portrait of the young man we've vaporized. And he addresses the utter opacity of the process whereby the decision is arrived at to kill someone on the other side of the globe.
Professional murderers in the employ of United States agencies are utterly unaccountable. The same point could be made in the case of the summary execution of a genuine "combatant," or in the case of the many collateral deaths resulting from remote-control assassinations. But Chatterjee senses, correctly, that the point has more impact when the target is an apparently innocent child.
I'll never vote for Hussein O'Bomber. He's earned the disparaging use of his middle name by imitating Saddam in his cruelty. Awful truths in this article. Fly the flag at quarter-mast, immediately and for the indefinite future.
Oh, I'm sure that eventually the responsible parties will explain it all away as just another regrettable Merry Mixup.
After all, as the imperial Amerikan civilian, military, and security-apparatus authorities of every party, background, and color (although uniformly blood-soaked) never tire of reminding us, you can't make a Free and Secure Omelet without breaking a few eggs-- not to mention putting jelly on the side.
And i thought no president could stoop lower than George Bush. Obama lowers the bar with every drone murder he signs on to.
The mantle as world,s # 1 terrorist has certainly been passed from mass murderers bush/cheney unto mass murderer obomber !
It’s hard to know what to say about this frightening development of drone warfare. Drone warfare represents the ultimate horror that virtually all science fiction writers of note have warned us of at one time or another. For those of us who grew up during the “Star Wars” era, especially those of us who saw all those movies when we were teenagers, it is prophetically ironic: Darth Vader’s Evil Empire frequently made recourse to robotic or semi-robotic devices in its war against the “rebellion”. We grew up experiencing that as the “ultimate evil”, just as people in my father’s generation grew up associating Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich as the “ultimate evil”.
Now we Americans seem to have become precisely what the entire Hollywood entertainment industry seemed to have been telling us (at least at the time) that we must not be, and that we must fight against. Certainly, if there is any counterpart to Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi, it would be someone in Afghanistan or Pakistan! We, on the other hand, are the Imperial Storm Troopers, we are the ones who man the Death Star and blast countless innocents into oblivion. I find it so bizarre, that with all the popularity of the Star Wars series of movies (according to Wikipedia grossing $4.41 billion, just trailing the Harry Potter and James Bond films), we Americans now seem to be blissfully unaware that, according to our very own definition of “absolute evil”, we have become precisely that, ABSOLUTE EVIL!
AA1-
I note the irony of your concluding point, on how Star Wars' $4.41 billion gross is third, the Harry Potter films come in second place, and the big box office winner and still champion is - James Bond.
Super smooth, super macho 007 James Bond, the spy with the license to kill, is a fictional figure, just like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter. Yet gradually, amazingly, the real world Central Intelligence Agency took it upon itself to believe its real world federal payroll employees could be similarly empowered with a permit to commit murder. Along with traditional assassins' tools like handguns, sniper rifles, garrots, knives, poisons or bombs, America's drone spooks now use Hellfires and Predators.
Here we have life imitating art, if "art" is a generous term properly applied to Ian Flemming's novels, and the wildly popular, cartoonish motion picture fare that Flemming's pot boiler fiction series spawned. The fictional James Bond figure usually started with a detailed briefing of monstrous past criminal activities of his arch villain protagonists at least, coupled with a ticking time bomb scenario calling for immediate, extraordinary measures necessitating 007 to venture forth into harms' way in order to ward off doomsday.
In contrast, for the 21st Century drone warriors at Langley, identifying the terrorist bad guys amidst the swarthy local population is always problematic in the first place, with collateral damage killing a few innocent civilians seen as just an unfortunate, inevitable byproduct of institutionalizing targeted assassination/murder, while re-labeling this style of hi tech homicide as some newly discovered form of war.
Nothing in the federal statutes creating the Central Intelligence Agency (starting with the National Security Act of 1947) ever gave anybody authority to issue a license to anybody to kill anybody. This whole notion was simply testosterone crazed, fictionalized bullshit when 007's personna coined the term in the early 60's. That it has morphed into a policy option, an officially sanctioned tool in Uncle Sam's toolbox for statecraft, is the most morbid, macabre feature of the Bush/Obama legacy.
People who don't know the difference between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality, should not be permitted to make life and death choices in the real world where the real humans live.
Time to take the toys away from the boys - no more laser light swords, no more magic wands, no more licenses to kill.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill from Saginaw, you say, "Time to take the toys away from the boys - no more laser light swords, no more magic wands, no more licenses to kill." So how do you propose to do that?
One suggestion, which I made in my previous post here and elsewhere, is that someone interview the survivors and highlight their sense of grief and loss, the same way the MSM does when when someone they care about dies. As things stand, the average American feels nothing when someone like this 16 year old is killed. And so no thought is given to the elimination of the "toys."
manning 120 -
The remedy for the CIA's Bondish license-to-kill mania is pretty straightforward. Congress should hold a few hearings, revisit the 1947 National Security Act that chartered the Central Intelligence Agency, and amend the Act to make it a federal crime for anyone other than active duty members of the US military (or, an authorized executioner on federal death row duty) to kill anyone, anywhere, for any reason on behalf of the government of the United States. Period.
This Congressional action would solve half the problem of drone carnage overnight. All that then would have to be dealt with is reasserting meaningful civilian command and control over the Special Ops Pentagon guys operating out of Creech and other military bases stateside and overseas. Taking the toys away from the boys is doable. All that is required is sufficient political will for Congress to undertake a modest, common sense revision of the National Security Act.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill from Saginaw, I'm not sure allowing active duty members of the US military to kill people would get this done. I thought the drones were used by active duty members already.
I think your suggestions re congressional action are well taken, but you're up against the same problem we always face in trying to curb this sort of murder and torture legally: there's no will to do so. I still maintain that putting a human face on the victims, and their survivors, would raise public concern enough that something might get done by an elected official. Also, of course, if a candidate already motivated enough got elected, that certainly would help. Fat chance.
Identifying the terrorist "bad guys" must go through the white house, spend along time in congress and the military...amerika IS # 1 !!!!!!!!!
It bears repeating that the drones developed by the U.S. are highly effective weapons of terror. Their use has terrorized the populations wherein reside the targets of the "targeted killings." Measured by the number of terror operations, the U.S. has surpassed Islamist terrorists since 9/11.
If another country used a drone to assassinate someone in the U.S., the government would be extremely outraged -- kind of like they were when someone (probably an FBI agent) proposed assassinating a Saudi official in the U.S. Yet U.S. officials think nothing of assassinating people (targeted or just "collateral damage") all over the Middle East. And the MSM never lets us know how the survivors of victims of these assassinations, such as the parents and relatives of Tariq Aziz, feel about what happened. For all we know, having read such articles as this, the survivors just shrugged their shoulders and went on about their business as if nothing had happened.
Chatterjee says some useful things, but merely condemning the death isn't doing much. When an American dies at the hands of an assassin or murderer, the media go into high gear with reports about the grieving survivors, emotionally praising the deceased and expressing how serious was their loss. That's what really motivates prosecutors.
Unless they were Rachel Corrie or Furkan Dogan and the murderer was Israeli. Then the press also remains silent. Or like with Pat Tillman the murderers are found to be undertrained but overarmed US troops.
The Tillman case validates my point. MSM reports covered the emotional reactions of survivors. Action was taken with regard to the cover-up, but so far no one has been prosecuted for causing Tillman's death. However, the matter attracted a great deal of sympathetic attention.
Not a bad article but hard to believe Pratap, the writer does not know the answer to the questions he asks like:
"More importantly, since he was so easily available, why could Tariq not have been detained in Islamabad, when we spent 48 hours together?"
Answer: I think because the Pakistan police would not arrest anyone at those meetings let alone a teenager.
--------------
"Why was Tariq, even if a terrorist suspect, not offered an opportunity to defend himself?"
Answer: Because that has never happened before in this war by anyone killed by the USA.
--------------------
And finally: "If Barack Obama's CIA believed in justice and judicial process, they could have attended the Islamabad jirga last Friday and met with Tariq. It was, after all, an open meeting. They could have arrested and charged Tariq with the help of the Pakistani police."
Answer: Because in the current climate of relations, the Pakistani Police would probably arrest Obama or the CIA if they showed up at the meeting where nobody else was arrested.
Jim, i think you have to add that it's just plain easier, if not cheaper, to just launch a missile and not have to mess around negotiating with "those who are agin us." And just think, when you blow them to pieces with a Hellfire missile, you save the next of kin the cost of burial. Trying to look on the bright side here.
those dumfuks in Langley probably thought they were hitting the former deputy prime minister of Iraq.
No Due Process & No Accountability = War Crimes! Those boys were murdered! Thanks to Pratap Chatterjee for telling their story and raising the questions that a civil society must ask. From "Cops of the World" PHIL OCHS 1966: "And when we've butchered your sons, boys... When we've butchered your sons! Have a stick of our gum, boys... Have a stick of our bubblegum! We own half the world! Oh say can you see? And the name of our "Profits" is "Democracy"! So like it or not you will have to be "Free"! Cause we're the cops of the world, boys! We're the cops of the world!" Occupy Together! And Sing Out when you do!
Broadside Balladeer -
Phil Ochs certainly never pulled his punches, did he? Along with "Cops of the World", he did marvelous songs about the sins of hardcore segregationist states like Mississippi, an ode to the mentality of the US Marines landing in Santo Domingo, and (of course) the multilayered obscenities of Vietnam.
Ochs was a brilliant social critic and a very creative performer. He had a wonderful sense of humor, not all of it dark humor. That he died so tragically so young was a great loss.
Bill from Saginaw
Posted by Frodnonag
Nov 7 2011 - 5:53pm
>The wars, and the drone war part of them - none of it really has anything to do with terrorism ... the profit motive ... The point of the drone campaign may be partly to terrorize us at home<
Partly the profit motive (capitalism) and partly racism which, as Hannah Arendt noted, are often conjoined. Therefore, random killings or killings just for the heck of it are not unusual: Describing John Mason's raid of a Pequot village, Bradford wrote (not verbotim): "Those (the Pequots) that escaped the fire were slained with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others ran through with rapiers ...."
The taking of lives through deliberate starvation was common during the two centuries of British rule in India - there were about 40 significant famines during that period, and in almost all of them the British deliberately diverted needed food grown by Indian farmers to the UK and their largely white-populated colonies. Mike Davis ("Victorian Holocausts") gave the figure of about 60 million Indian famine deaths, which when included with the constant crushing of rebellions would amount to over a hundred million. Others thought the figure easily topped a billion, but that included deaths from starvation-related diseases. Whatever the figure, it was enormous, though the Western media has yet to call any British Prime Minister or monarch "bloodthirsty" or "megalomaniac" or similar epithets given to Communist leaders.
Non-white lives were worth nothing to the Anglo-Saxon imperialists, so killing Afghans need not involve any reason. Still, the intimidation factor cannot be discounted, nor the profit motive. But the random killings could take place largely because non-whites were and still are not seen as human by many in the military-industrial corporate camps (there was an unhappy exception, however: the Irish too were deliberately starved to death during the Great Potato Famine).
The really sad thing about all of this, is the number of people who will steadfastedly believe whatever our media tell them. They continue to read (If that is the correct word) tabloid newspapers (in the UK, that is the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express), and watch Sky News, all of which simply mention terrorists/insurgents.
There are never any hard hitting documentaries which show the true effect of our military actions on the poor civilians of these countries.
My friends now regard me as some kind of radical lunatic for even trying to mention things like this, they simply do not believe them, and say that I must be a terrorist sympathiser.
They do not seem to acknowledge that every innocent life which we take, will result in more people turning against us, and I know who the true terrorists are.
These people are not "killed" or "assassinated", they are murdered in cold blood by
the President of the United States.....Lets call a spade a spade, so to speak..
" The error could have been avoided, Clark points out in her report, if US military intelligence officers had just been "watching election coverage on television", instead of living in its "parallel world" remote from "normal, everyday world of Afghan politics"."
They are too busy monitoring Facebook and Twitter or mastering their video gaming skills. You would think at least a small portion of the independently contracted booming intelligence industry would be monitoring world politics and election coverage.
I'm sure someone in the military by now has apologized for the mistake. Maybe the family of each boy will even be given $1000 in compensation.
it is true that the u.s. has done some very ugly things in the past- no need to put in the list here. but still, this clinton bush cheney obomber thing has managed to plumb yet worse depths of depravity than ever before. using drones at all is cowardly, a disgrace to what little remains of our traditions, such as they were. the war department will show you videos of hellfire missiles in action if you want to see them. firing these things from drones at young boys is unspeakable as in there are no words so far invented to describe it.
Barack Obama -- He kills teenagers!
During the past two weeks, Barack Obama has murdered three young boys, ages 16 and 17, and one 12-year-old child, through the use of deadly U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and North Waziristan in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Pratap Chatterjee documents the atrocities in North Waziristan. e.g., the recent murders of 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan, in the referenced piece. The two were killed by a U.S. Hellfire missile fired from a U.S. drone on October 31, 2011, as they traveled in an automoble to pick up an aunt to drive her home to her village in North Waziristan.
Glenn Greenwald documents the atrocities in Yemen, e.g., the recent murders of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin in Yemen, in the following piece. The two teenagers were having dinner with friends when their lives were ended by a U.S. drone strike on October 15, 2011:
"The killing of Awkaki's 16-year-old son"
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/the_killing_of_awlakis_16_year_old_son/singleton/
"Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people."
The boy’s grandfather said that the 16-year-old teenager, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin, were at a barbecue with friends and preparing to eat when the U.S. drone attacked them and ended their lives.
The next time I hear Obama offer warm, self-serving, "fatherly" anecdotes about his own two daughters Malia and Sasha -- remarks always carefully scripted to make him seem super protective and fuzzy and cuddly and adorable -- I only hope my gag-reflex works long enough for me to get to a bathroom in time to avoid vomiting in public.
When Obama waxes lyrical about his own highly-valued, protected, and pampered daughters, I will be thinking about the tragic deaths of 16-year-old U.S. citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin, and of 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan, who will never live to enjoy another birthday courtesy of the Assassin-in-Chief and his dreadly drone wars.
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