Hellfire and Damnation: The Washington Consensus for Murder-Chris Floyd

[Clara T]

Hellfire and Damnation: The Washington Consensus for Murder :

By Chris Floyd

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.
 
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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.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/

[bemildred]

1. Kick for Mr. Floyd.

:kick:

[OneBlueSky]

2. from a link in that article . . . "A Formula for Slaughter" . . .

by Michael Schwartz
Mother Jones
January 11, 2006

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/01/formula_for_slaughter.html

A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies. The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000. Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of the war.

This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the antiwar movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.

One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly -- about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war. This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis killed. With the exception of the battle of Falluja, these sorts of high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.

- more . . .

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/01/formula_for_slaughter.html