Bombs, Beds and Benefits

[DemocratsForProgress]

Walter Rhett: Bombs, Beds and Benefits

Bad, bad stuff going round. A dangerous mystique. Macabre riddles and atomized vapors of blood. Thieving from the dead. Justifications without prayers. Turning the smiling children back to the vipers nest. Turning the rivers into toxic stew. Paying billions for doubling down on cheating and walking away free. Dropping the no-knock tradition of bombing to provide five minutes of pre-terror before the incoming kills the noncombatant outgoing, the grandmothers and their grandchildren. Strikes at invisible, unseen weapons and munitions that never go off—are we too stupid to have common sense? Where are the secondary implosions? Only dead civilians exploding. Only the dead silenced. The lies go on. Like drones. Mid-air explosions. Loud. They hurt our ears and brains. Bad stuff: death, lies, and theft. The wholesale breach of universal taboos.

In 8th grade algebra we learned about proof. If you make a statement, it must withstand questioning and challenges, it cannot be veiled in secret pretenses without transparent evidence. On C-SPAN, I watched an ambassador’s blithe disregard for these ancient conventions and modern principles: trust his country, he cooed; they have the goods; we don’t, nor will we be informed—but proof is evidence of logic’s action and reaction; if you blow up munition stashes, secondary explosions happen; if you fire rockets from dense urban neighborhoods whose rumble now makes passage impossible, how do you do so without neighbors protesting the stupidity of a tactical senseless risk; how do you get munitions in and out of these dense population centers, now collapsed heaps of rubble; where are the photographs, the evidence; the fire trails released in the videos of the opposing forces don’t show launches from the middle of civilian neighborhoods.

Why have only neighborhoods been taken out—warned by “the knock,” an unarmed thud on the roofs announcing the coming doom of fire and destruction; informed by dropped leaflets—are leaflets dropped on sites of viable military targets: are tunnels blown up above ground, and where are the secondary explosions, the fireworks that mark the site of a struck cache. How come there is 100 % accuracy with the dome of missile intercepts without knowing the place or time of missiles launched, and 0 % targeting and destroying of the sites and mechanics of the launches?

Is the air game for the country that suffered no causalities in its defense or from missile attacks for 10 days that much better than its ground game? Where’s the evidence that offers proof? That shows the world why neighborhoods have to been destroyed. Are these military targets? If we can be shown the destruction in the air and on the ground, can’t we see the proof?

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/07/23/bombs-beds-and-benefits/