POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ALASDAIR PALMER IN THE TELEGRAPH
I cannot understand how anyone can even consider the drone-killers legal, and I am ashamed that I ever praised the man, Barack Obama, who is responsible for this reprehensible behavior.
America's confused and bloody presence in Afghanistan and Iraq seems to have blurred the meaning of all such terms as legality and ethics in international affairs. We condemn China for keeping a peaceful protester in jail while we murder by the hundreds people legally guilty of nothing.
Just like Israel's assaults and murders and tortures of civilians and political opponents, the drones are nothing but organized murder.
First, the drone attacks have killed hundreds of totally innocent people.
Second, even their intended targets have been charged with nothing in a court of law. They are just summarily executed by a machine run by some buzz-cut thug at a computer monitor who likely pumps his arm when his death machine blows up a house which contains God knows what people, perhaps then going out for lunch and a beer. That is as far from legality and ethics as you can travel.
How is this activity any different to those South American juntas that kidnapped thousands over years and made them "disappear" - the euphemism for flying people out over the ocean and throwing them out of the plane.
This savagery represents the Israelization of American foreign policy - just kill anyone you claim is a threat to you, behavior which represents the absolute lack of ethics and utter lawlessness.
You cannot make a better, law-abiding world through such moral horrors.
Indeed, Israel and the United States have set examples of such outrageous and unacceptable nature that over the long term they have given potential terrorists a new standard for their work, besides producing countless new young people with grudges, keen on future vengeance.
Are we going to continue into the black hole of Stalinism on a world scale where someone’s wrong look or word gets them liquidated?
That really is the logical outcome of these horrors.
Of course, the claim that it is democracies engaged in this bloody work proves only that democracies are just as capable of murder and torture as tyrant states. There is nothing automatically moral or ethical about being a democracy.
And it tells us we should be glad there are not more such democracies.
