Summary: Death to the enemies of America! The US government acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. We’ve tried this before. It failed then. It will fail again. But this time we’re killing on a larger geographic footprint, outside the context of “war”, for longer. We risk blowback, when somebody who has lost a loved one decides to strike back. Somebody competent, with friends — or allies.
To the US government our enemies come in four kinds (source):
- Known insurgents
- Suspected insurgents
- people who would possible become insurgents if they lived to adulthood
- people who would be insurgents but for the fact that they are not insurgents
From The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam (1972):
Occasionally {General} Harkins would mouth phrases about this being a political war, but he did not really believe them. the American military thought this was like any other war” you searched out the enemy, fixed him, killed him and went home. The only measure of the war the Americans were interested in was quantitative; and quantitatively, given the immense American fire power, helicopters, fighter-bombers and artillery, it went very well.
And this:
That the body count might be a misleading indicator did not penetrate the command; large stacks of dead Vietcong were taken as signs of success. that the French statistics had also been very good right up until 1954, when the gave up, made no impression. The French had lost the war because of a lack of will and a lack of fire power; Americans lacked neither will nor fire power.
And this:
At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of {General} Harkins’ key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong. But the French, responded a political officer named Donald Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. “Didn’t kill enough Vietcong,” answered Kelleher.
From today’s Obama advertisement pretending to be news in the New York Times: “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will“. Read it carefully. Imagine how Adams, Jackson, or Lincoln would react to this.
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.
“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”
For more information
See Glenn Greenwald’s articles as Salon, one of America’s few remaining true journalists:
- “Tom Friedman offers a perfect definition of ‘terrorism’”, 14 January 2009 — “The New York Times war cheerleader urges that Hamas be “educated” by “inflicting heavy pain on the Gaza population”.”
- “The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of ‘Terrorism’”, 23 July 2009 — “The news reaction to the Oslo events clarifies the real meaning of ‘terrorism’”
- “The true definition of ‘Terrorist’”, 22 June 2011 — “Two Iraqi nationals are so branded for fighting against U.S. troops in their country”
- “Iran and the Terrorism game“, 12 January 2012 — “When Iran allegedly engages in targeted assassination, that’s terrorism; when it’s the victim of that, it isn’t”
- “Washington’s high-powered terrorist supporters“, 12 March 2012 — “As investigations begin into paid D.C. advocates of a dissident Iranian group, their self-defenses are revealing”
- “Report: U.S. trained terror group“, 6 April 2012 — “The New Yorker documents ample material support from the U.S. to MEK: A clear felony if true”
- “America’s drone sickness“, 19 April 2012 — “The U.S. slaughters at will, then shields its actions from all forms of judicial and democratic accountability”
- “Obama the Warrior“, 29 May 2012 — “A new NYT article sheds considerable light on the character of the Democratic Commander-in-Chief”
- “‘Militants’: media propaganda“, 29 May 2012 — “To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined “militant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone”