"Bride and Boom"-We’re Number One... In Obliterating Wedding Parties
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Washington's Wedding Album From Hell
Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 8:24am, December 20, 2013.
The headline -- “Bride and Boom!” -- was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”
It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners -- “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” -- in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.
And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that....
snip
...In this same spirit, the U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called "signature strikes" -- that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against "a pre-identified 'signature' of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity." In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a “suspect” category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are). In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind...
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175787/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_washington%27s_wedding_album_from_hell/#more
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Preemptive strike: Someone may say "The Constitution doesn't apply outside the US."
Isn't that a bit racist? If it's good enough for US, isn't it good enough for the rest of the world? Isn't that what we are "spreading"? Freedom and Democracy?
= new reply since forum marked as read
During the Falklands War a British submarine sunk the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano (killing 373); this was headline in the Sun (UK Murdoch paper):
