Chomsky: Obama Is ‘Dedicated To Increasing Terrorism’

[ucrdem]

209. Those are fine points, thank you. Here's what I would add:

It's important to remember that while they may use the same tools, or "repressive state apparatus" if you want to sound ponderous, the Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations were and are using them to different purposes. So while it's possible that Bush-Cheney had assorted nefarious motives with their rendition and torture operations, including terrorist recruitment, I see no evidence that the Obama admin does. From what I can gather Obama is using drones for what he keeps telling us they're being used for, i.e., to curb terrorism.

That's a police function and that's exactly how Kerry in 2004 said he would approach terrorism. And the available evidence suggests to me that that's what's happening: instead of increasing recruitment, as Chomsky and others would like us to believe so as to transfer Bush-Cheney crimes to the black guy, Obama and Kerry seem in fact to be diminishing it. And if you read the articles you posted it's easy to see why: if you were a teenager in Yemen and there were drones hovering around I imagine it would curb your appetite for mischief in the same way police cruisers do in small towns.


p.s. I often suspected that the torture prisons were experiments in terrorist creation, but from what I can gather it doesn't work -- innocent torture victims when released make every effort to resume what's left of their previous lives, as do combatants, if their war is still on, otherwise they return to civilian life. So there's little or no net gain in terrorism.