From Chris Floyd:
Just
a reminder: this is the true nature of the bipartisan, militarized
"security state" now headed by the progressive Nobel Peace Prize
Laureate. When you support the Laureate -- however "savvily" and
"critically" -- when you support the system -- hoping to "reform" it
from within -- this is what you are supporting. From the Guardian:
The last time I saw my mother, Momina
Bibi, was the evening before Eid al-Adha. She was preparing my
children's clothing and showing them how to make sewaiyaan, a
traditional sweet made of milk. … The next day, 24 October 2012, she was
dead, killed by a US drone that rained fire down upon her as she tended
her garden.
Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted
that day. The media reported that the attack was on a car, but there is
no road alongside my mother's house. Several reported the attack was on a
house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All reported
that five militants were killed. Only one person was killed – a
67-year-old grandmother of nine.
My three children – 13-year-old
Zubair, nine-year-old Nabila and five-year-old Asma – were playing
nearby when their grandmother was killed. All of them were injured and
rushed to hospitals. Were these children the "militants" the news
reports spoke of? Or perhaps, it was my brother's children? They, too,
were there. They are aged three, seven, 12, 14, 15 and 17 years old. The
eldest four had just returned from a day at school, not long before the
missile struck. ...
We want to understand why a 67-year-old
grandmother posed a threat to one of the most powerful countries in the
world. We want to understand how nine children, some playing in the
field, some just returned from school, could possibly have threatened
the safety of those living a continent and an ocean away.
Most
importantly, we want to understand why President Obama, when asked whom
drones are killing, says they are killing terrorists. My mother was not a
terrorist. My children are not terrorists. Nobody in our family is a
terrorist.
My mother was a midwife, the only midwife in our
village. She delivered hundreds of babies in our community. Now families
have no one to help them. And my father? He is a retired school
principal. He spent his life educating children, something that my
community needs far more than bombs. Bombs create only hatred in the
hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breeds more terrorism. But
education – education can help a country prosper.
I, too, am a
teacher. I was teaching in my local primary school on the day my mother
was killed. I came home to find not the joys of Eid, but my children in
the hospital and a coffin containing only pieces of my mother.
Our
family has not been the same since that drone strike. Our home has
turned into hell. The small children scream in the night and cannot
sleep. They cry until dawn.
Drone strikes are not like other
battles where innocent people are accidentally killed. Drone strikes
target people before they kill them. The United States decides to kill
someone, a person they only know from a video. A person who is not given
a chance to say – I am not a terrorist. The US chose to kill my mother.
No, Barack Obama didn't physically push the button on this particular
murder. That was done by some video-game jockey sitting in a padded
chair somewhere, very safe, very protected. But the murder was a direct
result of the decisions made by the "Commander-in-Chief" to set up a
framework of state murder -- sorry, "extrajudicial assassination" --
sorry, "protection for the security of the American people" -- that
allows any number of lower-level agents and officers to carry out these
high-tech mob hits on their own authority, for their own reasons.
(Though no doubt these decisions are processed through a complex and
sophisticated "decision matrix" made up of multifarious determining
factors -- like, "Dark-skinned bodies in an open field; could be
terrorists; what the hell, rub 'em out.")
Of course, the
Commander-Laureate does, like Stalin, personally sign off on death lists
on a regular basis, giving the direct order for a rub-out. But as
heinous as the White House death squad is, the murder program is
actually far more widespread than that, with faceless bureaucrats --
military and civilian (if indeed these distinctions still have any real
meaning in our militarised and paramilitarized security state) -- making
the call to kill as they see fit. We have no idea who these people are,
or how or why they make their choices to kill, or who they will target
next.
This is the system we have now. This is what you must deal
with -- not the hallucinatory fantasy where a good guy "progressive"
battles heroically against the bad guy "teabaggers," and needs our help
to keep him on the good path toward "reform." It's not a comic book,
it's not a civics book, it's a not a movie with a happy ending. It's a
brutal, murderous, lawless, dangerous, out-of-control engine of
destruction, encompassing the entire political establishment and all
those who support it, politically and financially.