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<h3 class="UIIntentionalStory_Message" style="font-size: 13px;
color: rgb(51, 51, 51); margin: 0px; padding: 0px;
font-weight: normal;"><span class="UIStory_Message">[The
excellent Chris Floyd quotes Johann Hari to give the lie to
the assertion that, despite the war, "You can't be a
single-issue voter!" and that you must vote for the
Democrats to protect us against the ignorant, racist,
fascist teapartiers... We need to face the fact that there
is no lesser evil; we must oppose the evils perpetrated by
the government that we're responsible for, at lest by voting
against them. --CGE]</span></h3>
<br>
Obama's Finest Hour: Killing Innocent People For "Made-Up Crap"<br>
Written by Chris Floyd <br>
Monday, 18 October 2010 17:03<br>
<br>
If ever I am tempted by the siren songs of my tribal past as a
deep-fried, yellow-dawg Democrat, and begin to feel any faint,
atavistic stirrings of sympathy for the old gang, I simply think
of things like the scenario below, sketched last week by Johann
Hari, and those wispy ghosts of partisanship past go howling
back to the depths:<br>
<br>
"Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over
your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It
is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the
Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses in
your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours
until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops.
Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the
robot-planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani
newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to
attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You
don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot.<br>
<br>
"Now imagine it doesn't end there: these attacks are
happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up
funerals and family dinners and children. The number of
robot-planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover
they are named "Predators", or "Reapers" – after the Grim
Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you
make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your
life, it won't stop. What do you do? If there was a group
arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be
violently attacked, would you now start to listen?<br>
<br>
"...[This] is in fact an accurate description of life in
much of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators
and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the
support of other Western governments, and they killed more than
700 civilians in 2009 alone – 14 times the number killed in the
7/7 attacks in London. The floods were seen as an opportunity to
increase the attacks, and last month saw the largest number of
robot-plane bombings ever: 22. Over the next decade, spending on
drones is set to increase by 700 per cent."<br>
<br>
<br>
Friends, it's very simple: if you support Barack Obama and the
Democrats -- even if reluctantly, even if you're just being all
sophisticatedly super-savvy and blogospherically strategic about
it, playing the "long game" or eleven-dimensional chess or what
have you -- you are supporting the outright murder of innocent
people who have never done anything against you or yours. You
have walked into a house, battered down the bedroom door, put
the barrel of a gun against the temple of a sleeping child, and
pulled the trigger. That is what you are supporting, that is
what you are complicit in, that is what you yourself are doing.<br>
<br>
But hey, let's be all super-savvy and eleventh-dimensional
ourselves here for a moment. Let's be pragmatic, and
technocratic, let's be grown-ups, let's not get sidetracked by a
bunch of jejune, dorm-room, hippy-dippy moralizing. No, let's
concentrate on practicalities, let's get down to brass tacks,
let's be serious and focus on "what works" to protect our
national security. OK, so here's the practical result of the
illegal campaign of mass murder that Obama is waging on the
sovereign territory of one of America's allies:<br>
<br>
"...Drone technology was developed by the Israelis, who
routinely use it to bomb the Gaza Strip. I've been in Gaza
during some of these attacks. The people there were terrified –
and radicalised. A young woman I know who had been averse to
political violence and an advocate of peaceful protest saw a
drone blow up a car full of people – and she started supporting
Islamic Jihad and crying for the worst possible revenge against
Israel. Robot-drones have successfully bombed much of Gaza, from
secular Fatah to Islamist Hamas, to the brink of jihad.<br>
<br>
"Is the same thing happening in Pakistan? David Kilcullen is
a counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus in
Iraq and now advises the State Department. He has shown that two
per cent of the people killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan
are jihadis. The remaining 98 per cent are as innocent as the
victims of 9/11. He says: "It's not moral." And it gets worse:
"Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated
family, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown
exponentially as drone strikes have increased. ... It could be
poised to get even worse: Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars says the
US has an immediate plan to bomb 150 targets in Pakistan if
there is a jihadi attack inside America."<br>
<br>
<br>
Why, it's almost as if the drone campaign was designed to create
more and more enemies -- and more and more contracts for war
profiteers to build more and more drones, which can then be used
to create more and more enemies, which means more and more
contracts for .... say, it is a practical plan, after all! A
practical plan to create terrorism, not quell it.<br>
<br>
And what is the "evidence" used by the Administration
militarists as they draw up their target lists for the
defenseless villages in Pakistan? What is the "intelligence"
produced by the $75 billion lavished on our 200,000 security
apparatchiks every year? On what basis is Barack Obama killing
people in Pakistan? Hari reports:<br>
<br>
"...[The] press releases uncritically repeated by the press
after a bombing always brag about "senior al-Qa'ida commanders"
killed – but some people within the CIA admit how arbitrary
their choice of targets is. One of their senior figures told The
New Yorker: "Sometimes you're dealing with tribal chiefs. Often
they say an enemy of theirs is al-Qa'ida because they want to
get rid of somebody, or they made crap up because they wanted to
prove they were valuable so they could make money."<br>
<br>
<br>
That's right: Barack Obama is killing hundreds of innocent
civilians in Pakistan on the basis of crap made up for money.
Made-up crap. For money. That's why a child who is just as
precious as your child is to a parent who is just as real a
person as you are was killed this week, by Barack Obama and the
Democratic Party and the entire bipartisan foreign policy
establishment of the United States of America: crap made up for
money.<br>
<br>
And of course, it's not just tribal chiefs making up crap for
blood money: the entire aforementioned bipartisan foreign policy
establishment is now and has for years been making up crap "so
they could make money" -- for themselves, for their corporate
patrons, for their government agencies, for their defense and
"security" stockholdings, for the perpetuation of their bloated,
belligerent, pig-ignorant domination of world affairs and
American society -- by killing innocent people all over the
world.<br>
<br>
"But oh my gosh, oh my lord, we have to support Obama! What if
those Tea Party Republicans get into power? What would happen
then?" What would happen? The same goddamned thing that's
happening right now, that's what. More and more war, more and
more murder, more and more domination by a militarist
kleptocracy. As Glenn Greenwald notes this week, Obama and the
Tea Partiers (and the neocons, and the liberal hawks, and the
Bush Regime war criminals) are in lockstep (even goosestep) on
keeping the War Machine stoked and rolling.<br>
<br>
That's why the opposition to the Tea Party Republicans has been
so anemic, focused almost entirely on personality flaws or
asinine comments or resume padding or stupid things they did in
college. The Democrats can't possibly attack them on substance
-- i.e., the fact that the Tea Partiers are rabid warmongers who
delight in murder, torture and repression and believe that the
poor, the sick, the old, the weak, the unlucky, and the
vulnerable should just eat shit and die already -- because these
are the same positions the Democrats hold! Who "reformed" health
care into a gargantuan, guaranteed boondoggle for rapacious
conglomerates? Who bailed out the bankers and left millions in
the hands of savage "robo-signers?" Who set up the "Catfood
Commission" and stocked it from top to bottom with long-time,
deep-dyed haters of the poor and the weak? It wasn't Dick
Cheney, bub.<br>
<br>
I don't want to see the Tea Partiers in power. But I'm not going
to support one faction of murderers and plunderers just to keep
out another faction of murderers and plunderers. Hari makes this
good analogy about the drone program:<br>
<br>
Yet many people defend the drones by saying: "We have to do
something." If your friend suffered terrible third-degree burns,
would you urge her to set fire to her hair because "you have to
do something"? Would you give a poisoning victim another, worse
poison, on the grounds that any action is better than none?<br>
<br>
<br>
Similarly, I say: would you support one murderer -- who likes to
break into children's bedrooms and blow their brains out -- in
order to stop another murderer, who would do the same thing,
from taking over a vicious gang of murderers? What would be the
basis, the reason for your support? That the first murderer
wears nicer suits? Digs cooler music? Throws better street
parties? Leaves a pretty little flower next to the blown-out
brains?<br>
<br>
For a system sunk so deeply in evil, there is no "lesser" evil
to choose. The militarist kleptocracy itself is evil, and every
political faction that does not denounce it and seek to
dismantle it is complicit in this evil. The choice is to stand
outside such factions; the choice is non-cooperation with evil,
as advocated by Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King. I'm not going to
spend my brief time here on earth standing with blood-soaked
killers, no matter what factional name they give themselves, or
what loyalties they might claim on our myth-clouded memories of
the past. I'm not going to teach my children that all we can do
is to grovel before one child-murdering maniac or another, to
keep quiet, to never speak the truth, to sell their votes, their
dignity and their souls to murderers who would pervert every
good instinct -- and every bad instinct -- every worthy hope and
every nasty fear, to keep themselves in power.Dead children.
Made-up crap. For money. That's what our leading "dissidents"
want us to support. There is much that could be said about the
utterly puerile arguments being offered for this murder-abetting
stance; but in the interests of brevity, and civility -- and my
own sanity -- I will forbear, and simply say: no thanks.<br>
<br>
<br>
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