Newt Gingrich recently asserted that the Palestinians are "an invented people," and that they are also "terrorists." Gingrich then offered this alleged history:
“Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire,” Gingrich told The Jewish Channel in an interview released on Friday.
. . .
[The] American Task Force on Palestine spokesman Hussein Ibish was quick to point out that “there was no Israel and no such thing as an ‘Israeli people’ before 1948,” when the Jewish state was established.
Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that the most damaging words tend to be those words like "terrorism," which have no clear meaning.
Unfortunately, prosecuting leakers is not really about upholding the law or maintaining national security. It is about making sure the government or corporations can continue to hide information they do not want citizens to know, such as the video of the horrific gunning down of Baghdad civilians by U.S. forces in Iraq that Private Bradley Manning exposed. In this example, this secret brings the lie to the official story of the so called humanitarian mission in Iraq. Exposing military wrongdoing undermines the power of the government and the corporations it supports who make their fortunes off war.
Prosecuting Assange to the fullest extent, which could mean prison or even execution for espionage, is not about bringing a criminal to “justice,” or protecting the citizens of the United States. It is about instilling fear and intimidation in any one else (including mainstream journalists) who might want to expose information about government or corporate malfeasance. The purpose of Assange’s prosecution is to send a strong message that whistle blowing will not be tolerated.
Mauding's account is bolstered by the unrelenting and precise writings of Glenn Greenwald, who points out that the Wikileak's release of materials apparently provided by Bradley Manning have done the opposite of threatening U.S. security.
[More . . . ]
Washington, though visibly diminished, remains an airless and eerily familiar place. No one there could afford to ask, for instance, what a Middle East, being transformed before our eyes, might be like without its American shadow, without the bases and fleets and drones and all the operatives that go with them. As a result, they simply keep on keeping on, especially with Bush’s global war on terror and with the protection in financial tough times of the Pentagon (and so of the militarization of this country).
What would you think about someone who started shooting a gun from the top of the Empire State Building in order to kill "bad people" walking on the sidewalks below? Assume that he could tell very little, if anything, about the people he was killing. Also assume that when we asked him to justify how he knew he was shooting "bad people" he asked us to trust him and questioned our loyalty to the United States to the extent we doubted him. Now consider America's largely indiscriminate killings using its huge fleet of drones. Glenn Greenwald puts it in perspective:
After I linked to [a New York Times] Op-Ed yesterday on Twitter — by writing that “every American who cheers for drone strikes should confront the victims of their aggression” — I was predictably deluged with responses justifying Obama’s drone attacks on the ground that they are necessary to kill The Terrorists. Reading the responses, I could clearly discern the mentality driving them: I have never heard of 99% of the people my government kills with drones, nor have I ever seen any evidence about them, but I am sure they are Terrorists. That is the drone mentality in both senses of the word; it’s that combination of pure ignorance and blind faith in government authorities that you will inevitably hear from anyone defending President Obama’s militarism . . . . As it turns out, it isn’t only the President’s drone-cheering supporters who have no idea who is being killed by the program they support; neither does the CIA itself. A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described internal dissension in the administration to Obama’s broad standards for when drone strikes are permitted, and noted that the “bulk” of the drone attacks — the bulk of them – “target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups.”
Take a look at Greenwald's article to get a feel for what it is like for innocent families to live in terror of attack by drones. I wrote on this topic recently, actually twice, and I find it profoundly disturbing that this sort of sky-adjudication and killing is being done in my name by our large staff of predator pilots.
The way we are fighting our ongoing drone "war" appears incompatible with a genuine attempt to seek lasting peace. We don't have any confidence that we are killing people who threaten the United States. Shame on us.
How certain are we that the people being killed by U.S. drones are people who are threatening the United States? Linking to a BBC article based on reports on the ground, Glenn Greenwald discusses the hundreds of civilian casualties about which we almost never hear anything at all, many of these deaths involving children:
It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teeangers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons. . . . Everyone knows that the American President cannot commit “murder”; that’s only for common criminals and Muslim dictators (whom the West starts to dislike). But however one wants to define these acts, the fact is that we have spent a full decade bringing violence to multiple countries in that region and — in all sorts of ways — ending the lives of countless innocent people.
Viewed from a drone, any adult male in the tribal areas can look like a target, according to Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who is taking on the CIA.
"A Taliban or non-Taliban would be dressed in the same way," he said. "Everyone has a beard, a turban and an AK-47 because every person carries a weapon in that area, so anyone could be target."
This story reminds me of Amy Goodman's observation (and Jon Stewart's) that the United States excels at engaging in wars that remain sterile (and thus acceptable to Americans) because of the stunning lack of photographs. It is their contention (and mine) that if we had even a minimal level of reporting from the U.S. war zones, that our wars would quickly end. I suspect that the BBC is also correct that given manner in which drones are being used, that they are causing a lot of people in the Middle East to hate the United States. In other words, I have great concern that our drone wars are counter-productive to American long-term objectives. Many of the moral issues caused by the increasing use of war robots are discussed by Peter Singer at this TED lecture.
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