Praying at the Church of St Drone [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/NF07Df01.html
Praying at the Church of St Drone
By Tom Engelhardt
Jun 7, 2012

Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren't just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they - and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self - are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will", we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the "nomination" of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W Bush and which he has expanded exponentially.

~snip~

The language of the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places soaring. It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who - we now know - has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust assassination program in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan based on a "kill list." Moreover, he's regularly done so target by target, name by name. (The Times did not mention a recent US drone strike in the Philippines that killed 15.) According to Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one that unrealistically de-emphasizes civilian deaths.

~snip~

It's not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in any way involved in assassination programs. The state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history. How could President John F Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against Cuba's Fidel Castro, the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.) Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the CIA carried out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix. It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up in the process.