I HAVE A DREAM vs. I
HAVE A DRONE
Posted on January 20, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog
Obama’s Drone Policy Is Backfiring
John Glaser notes:
Michael Boyle, who was on Obama’s
counter-terrorism advisory group in the run-up to the 2008 election, writes in a
study for the Chatham House journal International Affairs that Obama
abandoned his pledge to restore respect for the rule of law following the Bush
administration.
Obama “has been just as ruthless
and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor [maybe worse] … while
President Bush issued a call to arms to defend ‘civilisation’ against the
threat of terrorism, President Obama has waged his war on terror in the
shadows, using drone strikes, special operations and sophisticated surveillance
to fight a brutal covert war against al-Qaida and other Islamist networks,”
Boyle writes.
The study concludes that the Obama
administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian
casualties” downward by counting all
military-age males they kill as combatants. Civilian casualties are
likely to be far higher than so far acknowledged, Boyle said, and government
claims to the contrary are ”based on a highly selective and partial reading of
the evidence.”
“The result of the ‘guilt by
association’ approach has been a gradual loosening of the standards by which
the US selects targets for drone strikes,” the study says.
“The consequences can be seen in the
targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and
tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur. No one really knows
the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned,
lands.”
Stanley McChrystal, the former
military general that Obama fired after he made
disparaging remarks about the President to a reporter, is also speaking out against the drone war now.
“What scares me about drone strikes
is how they are perceived around the world,” McChrystal said in an interview.
“The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes…is much greater
than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level,
even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”
McChrystal added that drones
exacerbate a “perception of American arrogance.”
The retired general has a history of
bluntness in this respect. McChrystal has also explained matter-of-factly to
the New York
Times how the US military “have shot an amazing number of
people [in Afghanistan], but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a
threat.” He also, rather adroitly, explained the logic of what he called
“insurgent math.” That is, “for every innocent person you kill, you create
10 new enemies.”
Boyle says there is an urgent need
for greater transparency because most Americans remained “unaware of the scale
of the drone programme…and the destruction it has caused in their name”.
He added that drones are having
“adverse strategic effects” by causing hatred among the local populations where
US bombs fall and also by ”encouraging a new arms race that will empower
current and future rivals and lay the foundations for an international system
that is increasingly violent.”
A report by researchers at the Stanford and NYU
schools of law found in
September that the drone program is “terrorizing” the people of Pakistan and
that it is having “counterproductive” effects.
The US drone war in Pakistan not
only kills and injures civilians, the report finds, but it
traumatizes the population and has led people to keep their children
home from school and to avoid any large grouping of people, however innocent.
It also says the drone war has helped recruitment efforts of extremist groups
like al-Qaeda.
Nice job
creating more terrorists … you morons.
Obama might be our first black
president, but – as William Banzai shows
in graphic form – Obama is no
Martin Luther King Jr:
Watch this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/expd/8356626244/in/photostream/ [[is this FOX??]]
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