Johann Hari writes:
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 on your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbors 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.
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 were a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?
This sounds like a sketch for the next James Cameron movie — but it 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 — fourteen times more than the 7/7 attacks in London. Last month there was the largest number of robot plane bombings ever: 21. Over the next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700 percent.
Obama is a WAR CRIMINAL.
Just like Bush, Chenney, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Wolfowitz, Perle, D. Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Rice, Rumsfeld and all the rest of those dispeakable scum.
They are all still walking freely and killing and torturing innocents (Still happens at Bagram prison) because they all live in the Failled States of North America.
Let’s call a spade a spade.
The drone war is simply state sponsored terror on a massive scale.
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “wholesale” terror engaged in by the state is many times more destructive than the “retail” terror of guerillas and “militants”.
The US has done this type of thing many before. The American supported “death squads” that murdered tens of thousands of leftists and their supporters in Central America during the 1980s come to mind.
Only the methodology has changed.
Once you’ve become the uncontested bully in the sand box, when the parents allow the bad habits, that they know are bad, to continue, then it’s only a matter of time before another bully appears to take the others place. Isn’t it most always the case, that the challenge comes from within? So, that being the case, then we can see by the powers to be, that the greed, corruption, ignorance, is destroying, like the terminal cancer patient. At the speed taking place today, it won’t be long before this takes place. One has to ask the question; “who will be left to farm the fields, provide the food, manufacture the goods? “WHO”
The drone assassinations are war crimes. The operators, technicians, commanders, and commanders in chief must have their days in court at den Hague.
The Americans do not recognize that at the moment for the simple reason that the rest of the nations with drone assassination capability have not yet undertaken the campaigns with the same intensity. Wait until some power without the fear of reprisals has their own Prompt Global Strike that can take out their enemies on a 30 minute notice.
The truly scary part of this is that it is only the US (and Israel) that are using this truly evil ‘kill-from-afar’ method. (Alhough multi-weaponed airplanes flown by human pilots are almost as divorced from the horrific reality of their ‘smart strikes’. Wait until China starts using drones in Xinjiang or Tibet, or Russia in Chechnya or Dagestan, and then wait for the hypocritical uproar that will result in the US.