Boardman writes: "Who are the terrorists, and can you know one when you see one?"
President Obama. (photo: White House)
Terror in the Mirror
27 April 13
ho are the terrorists, and can you know one when you see one?
How is President Obama not a terrorist, like President Bush and other presidents before him?
What does it mean to be a terrorist? Isn't someone who commits or colludes in a terrorist act quite simply a terrorist?
What is a terrorist act? Isn't a terrorist act an act of violence designed to murder, main, and terrorize civilians?
Is there a difference between a terrorist act and an act of war? Not necessarily. The bombing of London in 1941 and Hiroshima in 1945 were acts of war, and they were both terrorist acts. The former failed, the latter succeeded, and the ripples of nuclear terror continue spreading almost 70 years later.
American drones, Reapers and Predators especially, are weapons of terror. Sometimes they are aimed at specific targets, sometimes they hit those targets, and sometimes they kill indiscriminately. People on the ground can hear or see the drones, but can't know what the drones will do, and that uncertainty gives drones their power to terrorize.
Even unarmed surveillance drones terrorize populations below, who have no way of knowing if unarmed drones are armed or not.
What Terrorist Wouldn't Love to Have a Drone Fleet?
The drone is the American government's terrorist weapon of choice in recent years. Government officials have said they like it because they can target particular individuals who pose some real or imagined threat to the U.S. They don't say, although it appears to be true, that they also like killer drones because even when they miss their target and only achieve wanton killing, that "protects" Americans, too.
American government terrorists have used lethal drones to kill people abroad for a decade or more. The government still keeps much of the drone program secret, especially the actual results of drone strikes. It seems actual carnage, actual dead women and actual dead babies, might undercut widespread popular support for drone killings that are believed to be highly selective and accurate in taking out our legitimate enemies, and only our legitimate enemies.
Most of Congress has apparently felt that way and still does. Until recently, no Senate or House committee had held a single public hearing to find out just what the program of presidential assassination-by-drone was, much less why it was right or even legal for the executive branch to execute people, based on secret "evidence," without due process that included a trial or verdict.
Finally, on April 23, 2013, the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, chaired by Democratic senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, held a hearing entitled "Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing." The hearing began at 4 p.m.
The Executive Branch Chose Not to Talk About Its Acts of Terror
Even though this was the first ever public Congressional hearing on "Drone Wars," the Obama administration chose not to participate. And the Senate chose not to issue any subpoenas to compel executive branch testimony.
The Senate did postpone the hearing once, to give the administration more time to prepare a witness. In the end, all the White House contributed was an email from a National Security Council spokeswoman that said in part that the White House would work "to ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and the world."
The hearing's six witnesses included three retired military officers, two lawyers, one think tank director, and a Yemeni journalist who testified to how wonderfully his life was changed by a U.S. State Department exchange program that brought him from a remote mountain village to spend his senior year in high school in southern California.
How Does a Yemeni Feel When His Home Village Is Bombed?
The journalist is Farea al-Muslimi, who lives and works now in Sana'a, the Yemeni capitol, located about a nine hour drive north of his home village of Wessab. In his testimony, he said:
Just six days ago, my village was struck by an American drone in an attack that terrified the region's poor farmers ...I could never have imagined that the same hand that changed my life and took it from miserable to promising would also drone my village. My understanding is that a man named Hammed al-Radmi was the target of a drone strike. Many people in Wessab know al-Radmi, and the Yemeni government could easily have found and arrested him. Al-Radmi was well known to government officials, and even to local government Ð and even local government could have captured him if the U.S. had told them to do so.
In the past, what Wessab's villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderful experiences here. The friendships and values I experienced and described to the villagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love. Now, however, when they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time. What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America in Wessab.
Farea al-Muslimi first wrote about the attack on Wasseb, which killed five alleged militants, in the new media web site Al Monitor, which centers on Middle East news. The video of al-Muslimi's five and a half minutes of Senate testimony has gone viral on YouTube.
It's Not That We Shouldn't Dismember People, It's That We Should Do It Properly
Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, who served as the Pentagon's special coordinator for rule of law and humanitarian policy during Obama's first administration, testified somewhat gingerly at the same hearing that:
... right now we have the executive branch making a claim that it has the right to kill anyone anywhere on earth at any time for secret reasons based on secret evidence in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials. That frightens me.I don't doubt their good faith, but that's not the rule of law as we know it.
Why a former Obama administration official was talking about her own fear was not explored. But something else al-Muslimi said helped put the lawyer's fears in fuller perspective:
The drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis. I have spoken to many victims of U.S. drone strikes, like a mother in Jaar who had to identify her innocent 18-year-old son's body through a video in a stranger's cellphone, or the father in Shaqra who held his four-and six-year-old children as they died in his arms.Recently in Aden, I spoke with one of the tribal leaders present in 2009 at the place where the U.S. cruise missiles targeted the village of al-Majalah in Lawdar, Abyan. More than 40 civilians were killed, including four pregnant women.
The tribal leader and others tried to rescue the victims, but the bodies were so decimated that it was impossible to differentiate between those of children, women and their animals. Some of these innocent people were buried in the same grave as their animals.
Who Cares What Blows You Up, Once You're Blown Up?
But wait, some might say, cruise missiles are different from missiles from drones, and technically that's correct. It's also morally meaningless. The remote killing of civilians remains an act of terror, and a war crime, and it really doesn't matter if drone missiles have less explosive power and therefore kill innocent people at a slower rate.
These days, in America, drone wars are not part of a moral debate. Discussion of anonymous killing from the air has raised a debate about technicalities, sometimes important technicalities of ordnance, tactics, law, and constitutionality.
If the debate were about morality, we'd admit that our country commits terrorist acts with relative impunity Ð and then we'd consider whether that's the country we want to go on being.
Terrorism is generally thought to be a weapon of the weak, but there's no inherent reason it can't work even more effectively for the strong, at least in the short term. Especially when the strong have the media ability to redefine their terrorist acts as "targeted killings" or, better, "signature strikes."
What's good about the "war on terrorism" (for America) is that it's a war we can't lose. Those foreign terrorists, no matter how you add them up, cannot become an existential threat to the United States. They don't have the numbers or the resources.
So why does the U.S. pursue fundamentally impotent enemies with such implacable ferocity? Especially, why does the U.S. pursue terrorists in ways that create more terrorists than we kill?
Or is that the point?
What if the Point of the War on Terror Is to Sustain the War on Terror?
Since 9/11 our government, with the consent of all too many of the governed, has taken us down the road of permanent war against an abstraction - terrorism - rooted in a racist premise, that the terrorists are mostly Arabs or Muslims or some sort of poor, brown people.
They envy us our freedoms, as some like to say, with apparently unintended irony, since the course of permanent war abroad has been accompanied by a permanent state of security at home that looks more and more like the latest incarnation of a police state.
That enlarged authoritarian presence in our lives likely contributes to concern about the Constitution and the rule of law - even when those concerned ignore the rule of lawlessness in places like Yemen. Taking this situation as a whole, the Constitution looks more and more like collateral damage.
On its face, American anti-terrorism terrorism is insanely stupid in its ineffectual circularity. Or is it fiendishly clever, however planned or unplanned, in its seemingly infinite self-perpetuation?
When our president and our government commit terrorist acts, they do so partly in our name. When our congressmen and our senators seek to justify the government's terrorist acts, or to cover them over with a transparent film of legality, they do so partly in our name. When our judges allow the terrorist acts of the American government to go unchallenged and unaccountable, they do so partly in our name.
These are the fundamental elements of our three-branch government conspiring to commit terrorist acts around the world, thereby making us all terrorists, except those who resist.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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The public opposition to drone strikes, renditions,
night raids, and other terrorist tactics used by Americans
is pretty anemic.
While the American people seem generally reluctant
to go to war -- against Iran or North Korea or Syria --
the public sentiment does not seem strong and
there is a healthy minority apparently ready to send
other people's children off to any war they can have.
All in all, Obama seems under more pressure to do
most of what he's been doing than to do something else.
This does not absolve him of anything,
but it doesn't absolve most of the rest of us, either.
The pressure you refer to comes from the neo-cons, CIA, and Israelis. Obama is a coward and a liar.
Oh Bomb Ah - warmonger for the evil villainaire rulers. The Occupiers were soooo correct, with the chant:
GLOBAL REVOLUTION IS THE SOLUTION !
Somehow, I think NOT.
Does it make difference?
It does to me, and to those innocents who die, as well as newly born 'Militants', 'Reactionaries' defending their families and land
Obama is a terrorist, as is Bush, Johnson, Bush Sr.
and everyone involved in this Mass Murder Campaign
Also, 'Liar in the Mirror'. Tis guy is a pathological menace, in his ability to feign truth to the degree he does, repeatedly, and with premeditation.
We still know not the extent of his Terror Campaign...
Very Sad, and Horrifying, to anyone with a thread of Morals or compassion.
War is peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
THE NEW ROMANS LEARN DOUBLESPEAK
On the destruction of the Baghdad Museum*
War is peace and
peace is tyranny
A robot
mouthing words he’s been rehearsed to
whatever questions
he is asked
he answers in the currency
of plastic
platitudes
flag, freedom, democracy
Security —
war is peace
peace is war
war is security
security is
war
we will destroy
this village / city / nation / child
to save it
We will bribe the Turk,
barbarians will burn the Library, let them
pillage 7, 000 years of history,
enrich the greed/
y to save freedom, peace, the nation
will sacrifice the young for our glorious
future,
silence the speakers
to save liberty,
tax the poor,
kiss the oily feet of the wealthy
and loose the dogs of war
trailing
napalm, biting
at their open sores.
* At the beginning of the Iraq war, the few US soldiers there were told the priority was to protect the Oil Ministry building rather than stop the looting of the Baghdad Museum’s treasures of human history dating from 7,000 B.C..
But that's why those innocents who die the "collateral damage" is important. Like the burning of "hootches" in Vietnam, it sends another message: "Don't give refuge to our enemies!"
It's very much terrorism. It is violence use to induce fear in order to induce change in behaviour.
As a voter for over 40 years I have never derived so much satisfaction as I have for the knowledge that I resisted Mr. Obama's false campaign blandishments and voted for candidates who honestly stood for principles of peace, justice, equality and liberty.
Obama is the worst terrorist on earth. The boston bombers killed 3 people. Obama has killed many thousands and destroyed two whole nations-- Libya and Syria -- with his terror campaigns.
As to Libya, don't think we did as much killing and destruction as other NATO members, including Canada. And not nearly as much as Gaddafi did to his own people.
If the government were to divert that huge military budget to domestic spending to improve infrastructure, eduction, quality of life etc. which would create jobs, then perhaps Amerikans might wake up to the fact that it's in their interest to stop our death culture.
Money is really a morality issue...we spend money on our top priorities. The US top priority is Terra, Inc. Until, or unless, we make a paradigm shift in the purpose of life, ain't nothin' gonna change.
I can't help but think the founding fathers would go into total shock, if they could see what has become of the constitution and the country wrote the constitution for.
• Obama is a terrorist by all definitions of the word.
• Obama is a terrorist who deserves to be in prison enjoying fairer and more humane treatment than he doles out to his victims with hellfire missiles and to his American torture victims like Bradley Manning.
• Obama belongs in a cell, with Bush and Cheney. He is their getaway driver.
• Obama's response to being outed as a terrorist has been to escalate and expand his foreign terrorism to now include domestic terrorism against US citizens with his sequester.
• Obama with his sequester is now not only sanctioning Iranians, he is sanctioning Americans, and cowardly going after the old, the weak, and the sick - the people least able to withstand his assaults.
• Thousands of Medicare patients lost chemotherapy because of Obama's sequester. In one series of clinics in NY, over 5,000 Medicare chemotherapy patients are now being turned away because of the sequester. Multiply that nationwide.
• Anyone who voted for Obama in 2012 and is now supporting him is either consciously and intentionally a terrorist sympathizer and supporter, or is just plain stupid.
Not a single one connects America's presence in the Middle East with FDR's Malta promise to the House of Saud at the end of WWII. It was about putting returning soldiers back to work. Rubber tire economics would replace rail based distribution & mobility.
Truman upset the applecart when he supported the new State of Israel in M17 1948. Had FDR lived America would have still established corporate & military presence in the Middle East. Mohammedanism would have concentrated their efforts to push back the infidels without the Palestinian red herring. In fact, the Palestinian Muslims would have been worse off generally speaking.
ARAMCO, in a field of bidders instead of having carte blanche to Saudi oilfield development, would have been required to share the spoils. US motorists would paid more at the pump from the get-go. As technology and money flowed into Muslim economies, the seeds of Islamic world domination, dormant since the Battle of Tours, would have soon sprouted, Israel or no.
Unfortunately for Mohammedanism and their impulses, Israel's appearance in 1948 was more than a fluke in the UN Security Council. Hebrew Scripture contains many passages, some encrypted; very precise identification of Israel's return can be seen in 2500 year old writings.
Make no mistake though, as disappointed that we may be, we would be seeing even more carnage if the other party had won. Would they have stopped development of more drone use? Could they have in Iran already? Could we have had more foreign terror attacks?
What we do need to stop now is that the makers of the Drones are trying to promote their products for use by our police posing reasons that they can be used to monitor traffic better, etc. This I fear, but we all know that the Military Industrial profiteers will do anything to keep us fearful of our own shadows and we will accept everything they want to dish out.
The dystopia in the Orwellian world or Huxley's is real and we are starting to live it, while in other countries they've been in it for a long time, such as in North Korea.
It's about killing. The moment we stop killing people things get better. So let's just stop killing!
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