The human toll of the U.S. drone campaign

[Cali_Democrat]

BY GLENN GREENWALD
Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011 6:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time

The principal reason so little attention is paid to the constant victims of American violence in the Muslim world is because the U.S. Government refuses to disclose anything about these attacks and media outlets virtually never report on those victims (MSNBC demoted and then fired its then-rising-star Ashleigh Banfield when she returned from Iraq and pointed out that fact in an April, 2003 speech denouncing the “one-sided” coverage of American wars: meaning, the invisibility in U.S. media of America’s civilian victims). It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teeangers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons. That’s why it’s periodically worth highlighting the actual impact of those drones and the actual people they kill, as the BBC did as the BBC did today:

When tribal elders from the remote Pakistani region of North Waziristan travelled to Islamabad last week to protest against CIA drone strikes, a teenager called Tariq Khan was among them.

A BBC team caught him on camera, sitting near the front of a tribal assembly, or jirga, listening carefully.

Four days later he was dead – killed by one of the drones he was protesting against.

His family told us two missiles hit the 16-year-old on Monday near Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan. His 12-year-old cousin Wahid was killed alongside him. . . .

<snip>

But however one wants to define these acts, the fact is that we have spent a full decade bringing violence to multiple countries in that region and — in all sorts of ways — ending the lives of countless innocent people. Outside of Iraq, that process over the last two years has acclerated in both frequency and geographic scope. And it has left in its wake a horde of dead-16-year-old Tariq Khans and half-blinded, double-amputee teenage Saadullahs about whom we hear almost nothing. But the people in that part of the world hear a lot about it, and that explains much about the vast discrepancy in perceptions between the two regions.

Read the whole piece: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/02/the_human_toll_of_the_u_s_drone_campaign/singleton/

[izquierdista]

1. Working hard to earn that Nobel Peace Prize.

[valerief]

2. +1 gazillion

[GreenArrow]

4. careful...

someone got TS'd for having the temerity to post that the other day. Consistency in one's anti-war principles is apparently troll behaviour.

[DirkGently]

3. The Bush / Obama CIA murder drones campaign will go down among America's greatest crimes. Disgusting

[gratuitous]

5. I've had it all explained to me

And while I didn't always used to think this way, so many posters here at DU finally persuaded me that anyone luckless enough to find himself under a U.S. missile was a militant, a terrorist threat to our way of life, and deserving of summary execution. I had many difficulties to overcome in agreeing with this conclusion, notably a now-incomprehensible attachment to the Constitution and notions of due process, but I finally succeeded. I think it was the argument put forward that the decedent could have and should have turned himself in at any time to his American assassins, and that by failing to do so - whether he knew he was wanted or not, whether he might have some hesitation about turning himself over to the tender mercies of the authors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo - he had earned his sudden death. If enough people, or the right people, say a person is very, very bad, then the missiles fly and the bad guys die. It's a very neat belief system, and I find that I no longer have those lingering doubts.

Bless the Gun, the Missile, and the Holy Mercenary, forever and ever. Amen.