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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Obama continues to murder more people; nobody cares

Please take a moment to read this article on Obama's ongoing drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, written by Vijay Prashad over at Counterpunch.

The article covers a lot of ground, including a lot of material that many of Obama's apologists would prefer not to hear but need to hear anyway. For me, the most appalling piece of hypocrisy concerns Obama's drone-strike policy, which has killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan (where I used to live) and elsewhere. A particularly Orwellian point:

"As a result of the failure to target the alleged terrorists better, the Obama team has now come up with a unique method to define the kill zone. The administration “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants,” note Becker and Shane, “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” This is a remarkable standard. Anyone near an alleged terrorist is now a terrorist. The only way to know if they are terrorists or not is after they are dead. It is because of this that the Obama team accepts very low numbers for civilian deaths (as collateral damage)."

This is why the government can report, straight-faced, that it killed X number of terrorists in the latest drone strike: because anyone who gets killed is, by definition, a terrorist.

If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you're not paying attention. Obama has decided that anyone old enough to be a terrorist is, therefore, a terrorist, and the only way you can prove you are not is by being killed. This is psycho stuff by any measure. Imagine if this were John McCain's policy, or Bush's or Mitt Romney's. All the Democratic herd-followers would be out there protesting. But it's done by O-bomb-ya, so everybody shuts up and falls in line.

I despair for my country, and for the people in it who claim to be "progressive" and "liberal." What's new.

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