Posterity Will Hate Us: Building a Lasting Legacy of Death

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What do we aim at? Houses! Who do we kill? Everyone inside the houses! What are their names? We don't know! What did they do? We don't know! Are they civilians? We don't care!

This could be the catechism of the America's drone death squads that rain death and destruction on defenseless people from the skies of Pakistan, month in, month out, year after year. As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports:

"Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA's 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals. ... The project examines, for the first time, the types of target attacked in each drone strike -- be they houses, vehicles or madrassas (religious schools) -- and the time of day the attack took place.

"It reveals:

"...Over three-fifths (61%) of all drone strikes in Pakistan targeted domestic buildings, with at least 132 houses destroyed, in more than 380 strikes.

"...At least 222 civilians are estimated to be among the 1,500 or more people killed in attacks on such buildings. In the past 18 months, reports of civilian casualties in attacks on any targets have almost completely vanished, but historically almost one civilian was killed, on average, in attacks on houses.

"...The CIA has consistently attacked houses throughout the 10-year campaign in Pakistan.

"...The time of an attack affects how many people -- and how many civilians -- are likely to die. Houses are twice as likely to be attacked at night compared with in the afternoon. Strikes that took place in the evening, when families likely to be at home and gathered together, were particularly deadly."

Some of these operations are carried out at the direct order of the president of the United States, who meets with his advisers every Tuesday to draw up death lists of victims to be killed. Others are slaughtered by the innumerable officers and agents upon whom the White House has bestowed a license to kill as they see fit.

But as the Bureau points out, even when the name of the target is known -- although of course there is no need for any proof to be offered as to the target's ostensible death-deserving guilt -- they are most often blown to pieces in domestic homes, along with family members, friends and, often, neighbors who live nearby.

Sometimes when I write paragraphs like the one above -- setting out undisputed facts; indeed, facts that are often celebrated in the highest reaches of the political and media elites -- I find myself slack-jawed, drop-jawed to the floor with amazement. The bare, banal, widely accepted, shrugged-off realities of life in the American Imperium today would have been regarded, just a few years ago, as the wildest, most unbelievable fantasies of political paranoids.

The president sits in the White House and draws up death lists. Robot-controlled missiles blow up people's houses, killing hundreds of civilians each year. Not an eyelid is batted, scarcely a voice is raised in protest, except on the far-flung disregarded margins. This is the way the world is, and one must acknowledge that -- but sometimes, the cognitive dissonance hits you like a two-by-four upside the head.

But this is where we are now. This is what we are now. Future generations will look back on us in horror. They won't notice or care about the pointless, finely-meshed gradations of minute policy differences between the two parties, or between the two factions called "left" and "right"; they won't care if Barack Obama was or wasn't "two percent less evil" than George W. Bush, or any of the pitiful political molehills that entirely preoccupy our chattering classes. No; all they will see in a seamless record of murder, terror, tyranny and corruption inflicted by a militarist state on the world outside and on its own people within.

They will look at us just as we look at the people in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia and wonder, with revulsion and incomprehension, how such things happened, how whole societies could give themselves over to brutality and hate, how such vicious, vacuous, pathetic elites -- and their wretched little followers and sycophants -- were allowed to hold such sway for so long.

They will be sickened by us. They will hate us for what we let happen. And they will be right to do so.