Definition of “militant”

Glenn Greenwald discusses the definition of "militant" with Amy Goodman:

Well we, of course don’t imply that the President of the United States believes that he has the power to order people to killed — assassinated — in total secrecy, without any due process, without transparency or oversight of any kind. I really do believe it’s literally the most radical power that a government and a President can seize, and yet the Obama administration has seized this power and exercised it aggressively with very little controversy. What the New York Times article does is it adds some important, though very disturbing details. Probably the most disturbing of which is that one of the reasons why the Obama administration runs around claiming that the casualties of civilians are so low from their drone attacks, which everyone knows is false, is because they have redefined what a militant is. A militant in the eyes of the Obama administration formally means any male of fighting age, presumably 18 to 40, who is in a strike zone of a missile. So, if the U.S. shoots a missile or detonates a bomb by drone or aircraft and kills eight or a dozen or two dozen people without even knowing whom they have killed or anything about them, they will immediately label any male of a certain age a militant by virtue of their proximity to that scene. What the New York Times article said, was that the rationale for this is that they believe that anybody who is even near a terrorist or any terrorist activity is "Probably up to no good." Ironically, that is, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, the exact phrase that George Zimmerman used when describing Trayvon Martin to the 9-1-1 call, that he must be up to no good. The sort of suspicion, that even though we don’t know anything about somebody, the mere happenstance of where they are or what they’re doing entitles us not just to harbor a suspicion about them, but to kill them. And it is amazing that American media outlets continue to use the word "militant" to describe people are killed by American drones without knowing their identity, even though we now know that the Obama administration uses that word in a incredibly deceitful and propagandistic way. And the fact that Obama, himself, is sitting at the top of this pyramid, making decisions about life and death — issuing death sentences without a shred of oversight or transparency, really ought to be provoking widespread outrage, and yet with the exception of a few circles and factions it really isn’t. . . . he’s has been embracing these radical theories of executive power that even George Bush’s former former CIA and NSA chief General Michael Haden has lavishly praised and other Bush officials are over the moon about in terms of President Obama endorsing them. So, we know his policies have been extremist and radical, but here you have one of the most controversial things that a president can do — ordering an American citizen assassinated by the CIA in total secrecy with no due process, never been charged with a crime, even though they could have charged him if they really had evidence as they claim, that he was guilty of plotting terrorist attacks. Instead of charging him, they simply secretly ordered his assassination, and it turns out there was no struggling in terms of the difficult constitutional and ethical and legal issues this a obviously presents. According to the President’s own aides, they’re boasting to the New York Times that he has declared that this was an "Easy" decision, not anything that he struggled with, something that he made quite easily. So, we find out that not only is exercising this radical power, he is not even having any struggles with conscience or constitutional questions or legal or intellectual quandaries about it. It’s something that his national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, also bragged to the New York Times about. It shows how "Comfortable" he is using force, even against American citizens. That I think reflects really on the type of person that occupies the Oval Office.

Continue ReadingDefinition of “militant”

Why do we honor 6,440 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Memorial Day Question: Why do we need to honor 6,440 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq? Answer: Because they were asked to go there. To put this day into perspective, I've re-published this image by "ARG" at Pixwit (with permission of the artist): Additional note from the artist:

Chicken Heart Winner (Five-deferment Dick) November 17, 2005: As Vice President Dick Cheney attacks the Democrats for questioning the honesty of the president's warmaking, Congressman John Murtha, himself a decorated Korean War and Vietnam War combat veteran and a staunch warhawk, announces it's time to bring the troops home. Concerning Mr. Cheney's ranting, Murtha resorted to uncharacteristic sarcasm: "I like guys who got five deferments and have never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." Concerning Cheney's lack of military service, he's on record: "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

Continue ReadingWhy do we honor 6,440 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Preparing for missile attack

New round of insanity. Preparing for missile attack by blowing our infrastructure money: The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, rejecting Pentagon arguments that the facility is unnecessary and Democratic complaints that the nearly $5 billion project amounts to wasteful spending in a time of tight budgets. Won't they soon say that they need a West Coast Plan too, and a Southern Plan? The military-industrial complex will never have enough.

Continue ReadingPreparing for missile attack

Fighting singers

Who wants to see a bunch of good singers performing? Not so many hands. Who wants to see a bunch of good singers competing, with the losers sent home and the winner crowned as champion? I see lots of hands, and you people might be big fans of a TV show called The Voice, which just completed it's finale for this season. A man named Jermaine Paul was the overall winner, and everyone else from a huge field of singers, was not the winner. The stage from one of the earlier shows says it all. The singers were competing against each other in a boxing ring. They are hitting each other with notes. This is the art of war. The image at the right was from one of the early shows this year. I saw a few of the shows, and my family kept me posted about the shows I missed. Although this post is about singing, it could have been about most anything in America. We are a country that insists that we rank things from bad to good and that we need to have a best, a winner. To have a winner, we'll need some dejected competitors, some sad tears. [caption id="attachment_22546" align="alignleft" width="218" caption="Image from The Voice"][/caption] I thought of The Voice two weeks ago, when I attended a poetry reading by 50 seventh graders chosen by their schools to present their work. No, they didn't compete against each other at the reading. They merely stood up (many of them nervously) and read their work. We in the audience applauded them all because they were all admirable. To keep most people interested in anything, however, you need a good overall story. World class art hanging in a museum doesn't get loud applause. It turns out that conflict provides its own story. All you need is two people struggling over something, even something stupid, and you've diverted attention toward the struggle from every angle, like laser beams. While at work today, I glanced at the TV in the lunch room--it's always on and it forces me to see what corporate garbage (not always, but often enough) is pouring out. I glanced at the tube in time to see the beginning of the Wolf Blitzer "news" show called "The Situation Room." The opening graphics appeared to a series of images from around the world viewed through a gun site from a fighter jet. I suppose this isn't too surprising, given that the show airs in a country that is always at war, and would lose any sense of identity were it not at war. Our national anthem fits us well. Just keep giving us enemies or else we'll create them. If we weren't currently obsessed about the Middle East, we'd be demonizing China (actually we already are demonizing and provoking China). Would a TV show that simply featured excellent singers singing get good ratings? Not likely, but this is true even if the performances were much the same as one would see on The Voice. That is my assumption, and I based it on the powerful and highly addictive effect of gratuitous conflict, of conflict pornography.

Continue ReadingFighting singers

U.S. media ho-hum when U.S. drones kill five more kids from Afghanistan

U.S. drones kill five more kids in Afghanistan. The mainstream media keeps wondering why anyone would want to kill a U.S. soldier. Glenn Greenwald points out that these mental blockages tell us a whole lot about our warped view of the world:

To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
Today it was announced that authorities had foiled a plot to blow up an airplane. It was clearly stated that the plot never got off the ground, because the "attacker" was an informer working for the U.S. What dominated the news today? You guessed it. I'll quote Glenn Greenwald once more:
Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).

Continue ReadingU.S. media ho-hum when U.S. drones kill five more kids from Afghanistan