CounterPunch/Dissident Voice
by Ben Schreiner
Of the three presidential debates, Monday’s saw the only
mention of U.S. drone warfare. But after the challenger Romney quickly affirmed his support of President Obama’s drone program, stating that it
is “absolutely the right thing to do,” the issue was summarily dropped by
moderator Bob Schieffer. The president
thus skirted having to account for the most controversial facet of his foreign
policy.
Of course, the clear bipartisan support for the administration’s
ongoing campaign of assassinations can only portend a future of expanded drone
warfare and U.S. administered terror the world over—no matter the outcome of
the presidential election.
Indeed, a Tuesday report in the Washington
Post laid bare the Obama administration’s plans to ensure that any future
administration seamlessly continues its drone program. As the Post
reports, “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has
spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that
sustain it.”
The process of streamlining the administration’s program of “targeted”
killings has reportedly led to the creation of a “disposition matrix,” comprised
of both the names of suspected terrorists and the resources expended on their
targeting. This matrix, the Post reports, “is designed to go beyond
existing kill lists, mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects beyond the
reach of American drones.”
Such efforts to expedite the worldwide campaign of terror have
reportedly left the administration buoyant on the prospects of the program’s indefinite continuation. Officials, the Post reports, “seem confident that they
have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound
that future administrations will follow suit.”
“The United States’ conventional wars are winding down,” the
Post thus concludes, “but the
government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.”
Sure enough, as the Post
revealed in a separate report published last week, the C.I.A. has sent a
formal request to the White House appealing for an additional ten drones to supplement
its current fleet of over 30. If approved,
the paper reported, the request would “extend the spy service’s decade-long
transformation into a paramilitary force.”
Yet, as the Obama administration works to extent
the reach of
its aerial assassins into every last crevice of the world, its claims
regarding to the drone program’s effectiveness and “targeted”
nature remain in doubt.
According to a September report
on U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, conducted by researchers at the N.Y.U. School of
Law and Stanford University Law School, evidence that the program has made the
U.S. safer is “ambiguous at best.”
Moreover, despite administration claims of that there have been “no”
civilian causalities, the report marshals substantial evidence to the contrary.
Assessments from U.S. officials regarding the “collateral damage”
from drones, though, are heavily skewed by the administration’s definition of combatants.
Remarkably, as the New
York Times piece first revealing the existence of an
administration “kill list” noted, the U.S. “counts all military age
males in a strike zone as combatants…unless
there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” Kill first, we see, then ask questions.
Needless to say, all such reports ought to serve—at the
very minimum—as an impetus for an independent review of the the drone program. But as the Post reports: “Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone
campaign are almost nonexistent.”
The callous absence of doubt is evidently just as prevalent amongst
the elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe
Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horrors of the Obama drone
program.
In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe
Scarborough, Klein went on to aver, “The bottom line, in the end, is: Whose
four-year-old gets killed? What we're doing is limiting the possibility that
four-year-olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.”
The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can
freely emanate from amongst “respectable” circles in Washington is indicative
of the severe moral deterioration from which the Obama administration’s drone
program was born.
Of course, the very fact that the defining program
of Obama’s
foreign policy was discussed in far greater detail on a cable talk show
sponsored by Starbucks than it was in all three presidential debates is
quite revealing of the decay afflicting the nation's political
system. It's such a rotted system, though, that perpetuates our present
class of amoral and unaccountable elites who so readily wage a global
campaign of terror.
The twilight of
the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless
kill lists and its codification of murder.
Read at CounterPunch and Dissident Voice.
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