COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CLIVE LEWIS IN THE GUARDIAN
This time Britain must
resist colluding in US drone terror
Absolutely, Clive Lewis.
However, your "The use of drones devastates communities
and fuels terrorist recruitment" does bother me.
It is rather dithery and beside the point.
I really would have liked to have read a clear statement that
America's program of industrial-scale extrajudicial killing is one of the most
ethically and morally repellent practices in our world today.
All the people who are targets are legally guilty of
nothing, and when these innocent people are killed, we also see bystanders in
significant numbers killed.
Obama, who started the horror, used to sign off on
"kill lists."
Nightmarish enough, I think, but Trump doesn't even bother
with that, having told the psychopaths at the CIA that they were best to judge
who should die.
There is no distinction between this American horror and the
practices of the old Argentine junta making people "disappear" in the
thousands decades ago.
I think our public view of it is a fair measure of how far
we've sunk under America's self-declared world leadership.
________________________
Response to another
reader comment:
I find it troubling that people focus on America's
"collateral damage."
It is just a fact that the targets themselves are innocent.
And have you seen a couple of video clips from American
attack helicopters shooting down groups of obviously innocent civilians just
for fun in the Mideast?
The clips were kept secret, but some have gotten out.
It was exactly such a clip that aroused the compassionate
feelings and anger of Chelsea Manning when she viewed them in her intelligence
work years ago and destroyed her career to reveal what she saw.
You take a bunch of 19-year old Americans and send them to
the other side of the planet, a place they learn to hate, whose language they
cannot speak, whose customs they laugh at, and you have them armed with
powerful weapons and little accountability, and this just is what happens.
And do think it is any different for the buzz-cut thugs
working in CIA basements with computer screens? They play violent video games
with real human victims, and they have zero accountability.
Whether through psychopathy, a condition always affecting
some percent of any population, or brutal boredom by young people doing a
ghastly job, the results are the same.
And I remind everyone that America at home, the place from
which these soldiers and computer operators come, already is a very brutal society.
It produces large numbers of young people - whether gang members or local
trigger-happy cops - who are entertained by shooting people. It has the highest
violent crime rates in the West plus the worst record of abusive police and
prisons.
With these policies and practices, sick people are given a
legal way to do what they like doing and they are paid well for doing it. After
all, who else would be attracted to such "work” in the first place?
