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Hellfire and Damnation: The Washington
Consensus for Murder :
By Chris Flody
02/02/06 "Empire
Burlesque" --- -- Last month, President George W.
Bush murdered four children. This is not a controversial
statement. There is no dispute about the facts. Indeed, Bush's
own minions fully acknowledge – even celebrate – the deed. Nor
has the political opposition or the national media offered the
slightest objection to the principle of presidential murder.
Strange, isn't it?
While the American Establishment is now convulsed over the issue of
a
president ordering wiretaps without court approval, the same
president's assertion of
the right to kill anyone on earth he chooses without charges,
trial or judicial review is readily accepted on all sides. Even when
these "targeted assassinations"
go horribly awry – as in Pakistan last month, when 18 innocent
people, including four children, were obliterated in their homes by
Hellfire missiles, as the Observer reports – there is no demur, no
moral shock.
Just tough talk about "doing whatever it takes" to defend
civilization from the barbarians.
The misfired
Hellfires were reportedly aimed at al-Qaeda honcho Ayman al-Zawahiri,
thought to be the Dick Cheney-style brains behind the gang's dimbulb,
Bush-like frontman, Osama bin Laden. The missiles were directed by
unmanned CIA Predator drones, acting on the usual "credible
intelligence" that Zawahiri was in the village of Damadola, near the
Afghan border. But of course, in this kind of shell game, you can
never know exactly which coconut the evil ones might be hiding under
– so the CIA targeted not one but three houses, just to be sure.
Thus even if the intelligence had not been the usual half-chewed cud
and Zawahiri really had been in Damadola (sitting on top of Saddam's
phantom WMD, perhaps), the scattershot attack on the residential
area would have guaranteed civilian casualties in any case.
In other words,
"collateral damage" – always "regretted" with copious crocodile
tears from the damagers – was actually built into the
mission. As in Bush's
ongoing, ever-intensifying,
unreported aerial bombing of urban areas in Iraq – which has
killed thousands of civilians, TomDispatch reports – the deliberate
killing of non-combatants in Damadola and other targets of Bush's
"extrajudicial" wrath is meant to convey a clear message: "Knuckle
under – or else."
Indeed, the Bush
brass in Iraq have been explicit on this point.
As Michael Schwartz reports in Mother Jones, the regular use of
massive, indiscriminate force in anti-insurgent operations – e.g.,
destroying an entire apartment building, and everyone in it, if
suspected guerrillas are thought to be hiding there – is a key
component of Bush's "larger strategy" in the occupied land. Schwartz
quotes an officer who told the New York Times that American attacks
are meant to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also to make clear
to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating." This, as Schwartz
accurately notes, is "the textbook definition of terrorism –
attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from
the enemy."
But of course the
"War on Terror" has always been, in reality, a "War Between
Terrors" – state terror versus stateless terror, with one side
marshalling a military force of incomprehensible scope and power,
and the other side incapable of sustaining anything more than the
occasional isolated spasm of bitter fury. In fact, it's not even a
war at all; as many have noted, you can't wage war on a tactic –
"terrorism" (especially when you are employing it yourself). And the
small band of criminal cranks loosely grouped under the scarifying
rubric of "Islamofascism" poses no threat whatsoever to the national
existence of the United States or Britain.
(And no, the
well-sustained insurgency in Iraq has nothing to do with the "War on
Terror;" it's a standard response to foreign occupation. Anyway,
Bush is fighting with the Islamofascists in that one – the
Iran-backed theocrats he has empowered in Baghdad.)
But equating the
threat from the small clutch of knuckle-dragging goons in the bin
Laden gang with, say, the nuclear-armed might of the Soviet Union or
the millions of troops mustered by Nazi Germany, is a key component
of Bush's "larger strategy" in another occupied land: the
United States. By declaring endless war on a nebulous enemy whose
mafia was spawned in part by the CIA – and by allowing this Islamic
Pimpernel to miraculously escape from Afghanistan and roam like a
bogey-man in the backalleys of the American mind – Bush has been
able to claim the powers of a "war president" to implement a
far-ranging authoritarian agenda that his handlers like Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld have been pushing since their days with Richard
Nixon: a locked-down, militarized state, bent on geopolitical
domination and run in secret by a small elite of ideologues and war
profiteers without interference from Congress, the courts, the press
or the people.
By September 2000,
the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction was openly yearning – in print – for "a
new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" the American people into supporting
this militarist agenda. (Yes, it's our old friends, the Project for
a New American Century, the "think tank" that the Nixonites put
together with the neocons and the Bush Family.) Six days after what
Bush dutifully termed the "new Pearl Harbor" of September 11, he
signed a "presidential finding" allowing the CIA to kill anyone he
arbitrarily designates a "terrorist," the Washington Post reports.
The reign of authoritarian rule – of a presidential despot beyond
all legal and moral restraint, eagerly ordering torture, rendition,
aggressive war and murder – began that day. And it has never been
challenged.
Not even when Bush
kills children. American and international law expressly forbid both
the deliberate targeting of non-combatants and "extrajudicial
killing," even in wartime. Yet, as Reuters reports, Bush personally
ordered the Damadola hit – with its guaranteed "collateral damage."
This was, by any standard, deliberate, premeditated murder. But
still the Washington Establishment – Democrats included – rose to
cheer the killer this week as he mouthed his bloodstained lies and
cynical pieties in the State of the Union address.
No doubt the loud – and ultimately ineffectual – noise about
wiretapping will go on. But the voices of those murdered children –
killed without mercy, already forgotten – will never be heard again.
Copyright Chris
Floyd. Visit his website
http://www.chris-floyd.com
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