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Impeach Obama!

By       (Page 1 of 2 pages)   4 comments
Message Tom Santoni

Global Research, January 13, 2013

War is a Crime 26 February 2009

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How many Obama-ordered civilian deaths in foreign lands will you tolerate before speaking out and taking action? Three Pakistani children are three too many for me.

In a blatant and unmistakable act of war against a sovereign nation, Barack Obama, four days into his administration on Friday, January 23, 2009, as commander in chief of US armed forces, ordered the US military to launch Hellfire missile strikes on homes in northwest Pakistan, killing dozens of civilians including at least three children. The military was aiming to bomb al Qaeda and Taliban "suspects," but there was some unfortunate "collateral damage". Oops.

Bomber pilots who leisurely drive to work each day, safely ensconced on military bases in the United States, fired the Hellfire missiles on civilians in Pakistan from unmanned, electronically controlled Predator drone aircraft. "Predator" plus "Hellfire" translates into the remote controlled explosion of children's fragile bodies half a world away. Oh the joys of joystick bombing, the thrill of commuter combat killing, out of sight, out of mind, out of corporate US media.

The illegal air strikes and subsequent murder of civilians prompted mass protests against the US in Pakistan (a nuclear-armed nation!) and, in all likelihood, created hundreds more very angry people who are ready to do anything, anything, to defend their country, their families, and their deep sense of honor.

According to Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon official and fighter aircraft designer,

"... what happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we're trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have turned rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of other killing of civilians from ground forces."

So, in a spirit of bipartisanship and fair play, mindful that in the country I serve no one is above the law, I call for the impeachment of Barack Obama for war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter, and numerous U.N. General Assembly resolutions, just as I had called for the impeachment of Bush/Cheney for committing the very same crimes.

Anyone who doesn't think Obama should be impeached who supported the impeachment of the previous administration for these same crimes is dealing in double standards and hypocrisy. Everyone who voted for Obama has blood on his hands, especially after he made repeated campaign promises to increase already bank-busting military spending, double the number of US forces in the unwinnable US war and occupation of Afghanistan, continue to develop and deploy Reagan's Star Wars missile "defense" system, and to "go after suspected terrorists wherever they are."

Thanks to Democratic and Republican administrations alike, as well as to resource grabs inside developing countries by many Western nations, terrorists are now all over the world striking out against the continuing exploitation and occupation of their lands. Is Obama going to "go after" them all? With hawk-lady Clinton as Secretary of State and so many of Obama's cabinet choices steeped in generations of promoting US aggression, I don't doubt it.

Clinton's appointment of Richard Holbrooke as US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan is viewed by many as a recipe for disaster. Says Scott Ritter, former Marine Corp intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector,

"The cause-and-effect relationship between what the United States does inside Afghanistan and what occurs inside Pakistan cannot be ignored by American policymakers. He [Holbrooke] tends to seek military solutions to difficult ethnic-based problems, and he is likely to argue for the deployment of even more U.S. troops to that war-ravaged nation. That would be a historic mistake."

Obama, by surrounding himself with foreign policy hawks, is falling into the same old savage mindset: bomb first, analyze later.

As for the tens of millions of Americans who expect the Obama administration to hold Bu$hCorp responsible for it's murderous multiple felonies, don't hold your breath. With Obama engaged in the very same activities that enraged us and the world about Bush's neocon plans for "total global dominance" (this exact phrase appears throughout Department of Defense literature), do we really expect justice?

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Tom Santoni  is a long time human rights and economic justice activist, a professional musician and stained glass artist specializing in peace symbols, and a member of the Central Florida chapter of Veterans For Peace. He (more...)
 
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