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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmerican Drones Kill 28 Innocent People for Every "Bad Guy"
No, I *don't* think a Republican would be any better. That's NOT the point...
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/ted-rall/59815/american-drones-kill-28-innocent-people-for-every-bad-guy
Not sure what to be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend? If youre American, be thankful theres no God. Because if there were a Supreme Deity, and His take on personal accountability resembled Judeo-Christian mythology in the slightest, he would smite your oblivious apathetic ass for failing to overthrow a government responsible for something as evil as Obamas drone war...
Obamas remote-control drone murderers are the embodiment of evil in the 21st century: careless, alienated, remote, bloodless. They also symbolize contemporary political culture: arrogant, corrupt and stupid.
Check this out: A Reprieve team investigating on the ground in Pakistan turned up what it believes to be a confirmed case of mistaken identity. Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administrations kill list was killed on the third attempt by U.S. drones. His brother was captured, interrogated and encouraged to tell the Americans what they want to hear': that they had in fact killed the right person.
Every single day even as you read this American drones are stalking and killing innocent people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Theyre doing this in your name, using weapons systems you paid for. Yet youre still allowed to walk the earth, totally unsmoten.
GitRDun
(1,846 posts)It is astonishing how societies have come to accept the indescriminate killing of innocents in an attempt to police what amounts to violent gangs.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Money trumps peace. Innocent people? Collateral Damned and Damaged.
The traitors, warmongers, mass murderers, and cronies of War Inc all deserve full and complete punishment.
As for Judgment, that is open to debate.
Wella
(1,827 posts)Democracy Now has been harping on the drone issue, but so few people are actually listening:
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/25/headlines#11253
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Because it doesn't look like a police state, most folks have no idea where this is going.
The Last Gasp of American Democracy
By Chris Hedges
TruthDig.org, Posted on Jan 5, 2014
EXCERPT...
The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security.
I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasithe Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Communist Party described as the shield and sword of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation.
The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the populationone for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in Americas black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.
[font color="green"]The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not, in the end, to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population. And because Americans emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough evidence to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant. [/font green]
The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.
CONTINUED...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_american_democracy_20140105
Put killer robots and mass surveillance together with supercomputers and Reaganomics for a New World Order for the Ages with Blackwater calling the shots.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Thank you.
Wella
(1,827 posts)and crimes will be invented with email records, shopping records, etc.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)1) the administration's craven and dishonest redefinition of "militant" to include ANY male of a certain age who happens to have been slaughtered by a drone,
To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002741255
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/
and
2) the administration's unconscionable adoption of "double-tapping," an Orwellian euphemism for the practice of attacking the same site again after a short pause, such as when first responders have appeared on the scene.The most grotesque and blatantly illegal aspect of drone killing: Double Tapping
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3901827
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24557333
G_j
(40,367 posts)simak
(116 posts)It's not really an equation till you have all the figures.