"If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they've murdered those people. When the Obama administration sets a policy where patterns of life are enough of a green light to drop missiles on people or to send in AC130s to spray them down..."Jeremy Scahill Calls President Obama A Murderer
By Benjamin Hart from Huff Post via Information Clearing House June 4,2012
I ask this sincerely: what kind of country targets rescuers, funeral attendees, and people gathered to mourn? If a Hollywood film featured a villainous King ordering lethal attacks on rescuers, funerals and mourners — those medically attending to or grieving his initial victims — any decent audience member would, by design, seethe with contempt for such an inhumane tyrant. But this is the standard policy and practice under President Obama and it continues through today. Recall the outrage that was sparked when WikiLeaks released its Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter during the Bush era firing on unarmed rescuers, who had arrived to retrieve the initial victims who had been shot and were laying wounded on the ground. That tactic continues under President Obama, although it is now expanded to include the targeting of grieving rituals.Glenn Greenwald, June 4, 2012.
U.S. Again Bombs Mourners
The Obama policy of attacking rescuers and grieving rituals continues this weekend in Pakistan By Glenn Greenwald at Salon via Information Clearing House, June 4, 2012
- In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: “the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals.” As The New York Times summarized those findings: “at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile” while “the bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals.”
This repellent practice continues. Over the last three days, the U.S. has launched three separate drone strikes in Pakistan: one on each day. As The Guardian reports, the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 people in these strikes, the last of which, early this morning, killed between 8 and 15. It was the second strike, on Sunday, that targeted mourners gathered to grieve those killed in the first strike:
At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.
Note that there is no suggestion, even from the “officials” on which these media reports (as usual) rely, that the dead man was a Terrorist or even a “militant.” He was simply receiving condolences for his dead brother. But pursuant to the standards embraced by President Obama, the brother — without knowing anything about him — is inherently deemed a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target for death solely by virtue of being a “military-age male in a strike zone.” Of course, killing family members of bombing targets is nothing new for this President: let’s recall the still-unresolved question of why Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen two weeks after his father was killed.
I ask this sincerely: what kind of country targets rescuers, funeral attendees, and people gathered to mourn? If a Hollywood film featured a villainous King ordering lethal attacks on rescuers, funerals and mourners — those medically attending to or grieving his initial victims — any decent audience member would, by design, seethe with contempt for such an inhumane tyrant. But this is the standard policy and practice under President Obama and it continues through today. Recall the outrage that was sparked when WikiLeaks released its Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter during the Bush era firing on unarmed rescuers, who had arrived to retrieve the initial victims who had been shot and were laying wounded on the ground. That tactic continues under President Obama, although it is now expanded to include the targeting of grieving rituals.
...When it comes to his militarism, secrecy obsessions, and ongoing killing, that’s the company President Obama keeps. Many progressives like to fantasize that conservatives refuse to give President Obama credit no matter what he does, but that is absolutely false. While the ACLU and human rights groups have repeatedly sued the administration and denounced Obama himself in the harshest possible terms, while U.N. investigators formally condemn him, the the neocons and warmongers who were once so despised in progressives circles have watched as he has vindicated their record, and have, in return, become his most enthusiastic defenders. There’s an obvious reason this revealing, counterintuitive split is so acute, even if it’s one many progressives would prefer to ignore.
* * * * *
For those who now embrace the Cheney-Rove tactic of chanting the “Terrorist!” mantra to justify everything the President does: even The Washington Post now recognizes that many of Obama’s drone targets are not actually plotting against the U.S., because “the Obama administration has embraced a broader definition of what constitutes a terrorism threat that warrants a lethal response” (that includes two more relatives of Anwar Awlaki, related to him by marriage, whom the U.S. is now targeting in Yemen for death). The U.S. has been continuously killing people in the Muslim world for close to a full decade now. The amount of gullibility it takes to believe that the U.S. is merely killing “Terrorists” — over and over and over and over — is just staggering (and for those who do believe that there are so many Terrorists trying to attack the U.S. even after a decade of supposedly killing them over and over, you might ask yourself: why are there so many people so eager to attack the U.S.?). Along those lines, The Guardian‘s correspondent Paul Harris this weekend detailed the ways in which Obama has replicated, and in many instances exceeded, many of Bush’s once-controversial abuses.
Jeremy Scahill Calls President Obama A Murderer
By Benjamin Hart from Huff Post via Information Clearing House June 4,2012
Weighing in on President Obama's targeted drone strikes in the Middle East, journalist Jeremy Scahill did not mince words.
During his appearance on MSNBC's "Up With Chris Hayes" Saturday morning, Scahill repeatedly said that such attacks, when they killed innocent civilians, amounted to "murder."
Asked by Hayes why he would use such a "loaded" word to describe the strikes, Scahill responded at length.
"If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they've murdered those people. When the Obama administration sets a policy where patterns of life are enough of a green light to drop missiles on people or to send in AC130s to spray them down..."
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