Let's examine also McCain's description of the "war on terror" further. If this hellbent enemy has an "easily replaceable-leadership," then it doesn't really matter how many of its leaders the U.S. captures, tortures, and kills with drones or Spec Ops teams wearing night vision goggles. Because if they're so hellbent and they're longstanding and dedicated, and their leaders are easily replaceable, then this is a war that can only be waged forever, and never won.
Which is precisely the point from the standpoint of those in authority over us, whether Republican or Democrats. As long as this putative war continues, they can arrogate to themselves more and more power with no discernible restrictions, legal or otherwise. Dick Cheney famously said that this war would last for generations. And he, for once, wasn't lying.
An endless war against an enemy that cannot be defeated (you can't destroy terrorism since terrorism is a tactic, anymore than you can declare that from henceforth, no one should ever swear) has been made the U.S.'s Public Policy #1 and all things, our laws, our courts, our resources, our citizens and any and all non-citizens, shall forever be subordinated to this emergency condition. Emergency conditions are now the status quo. And major media do not see fit to explain that to us.
In The New Yorker is an article by Teju Cole, entitled "A Reader's War," dated February 11, 2013. I'm ending this article with an excerpt from his essay:
The White House, the C.I.A., and the Joint Special Operations Command have so far killed large numbers of people . Because of the secret nature of the strikes, the precise number is unknown, but estimates range from a several hundred to over three thousand. These killings have happened without any attempt to arrest or detain their targets, and beyond the reach of any legal oversight. Many of the dead are women and children. Among the men, it is impossible to say how many are terrorists, how many are militants, and how many are simply, to use the administration's obscene designation, " young men of military age ." The dependence on unmanned aerial vehicles--also called drones--for these killings, which began in 2002 and have increased under the Obama Administration, is finally coming to wider attention.
We now have firsthand testimony from the pilots who remotely operate the drones, many of whom have suffered post-traumatic stress reactions to the work. There is also the testimony of the survivors of drone attacks: heartbreaking stories of mistaken identity, grisly tales of sudden death from a machine in the sky. In one such story reported by The New York Times , the relatives of a pair of dead cousins said, "We found eyes, but there were no faces left." The recently leaked Department of Justice white paper indicating guidelines for the President's assassination of his fellow Americans has shone a spotlight on these "dirty wars" (as the journalist Jeremy Scahill rightly calls them in his documentary film and book of the same title). The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.
"
According to a report in the New York Times , the targets of drone strikes are selected for death at weekly meetings in the White House; no name is added to the list without the President's approval. Where land mines are indiscrim[in]ate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt . The sixteen near misses of the preceding year killed between two hundred and eighty and four hundred and ten other people. Literature fails us here. What makes certain Somali, Pakistani, Yemeni, and American people of so little account that even after killing them, the United States disavows all knowledge of their deaths? How much furious despair is generated from so much collateral damage?
Of late, riding the subway in Brooklyn, I have been having a waking dream, or rather a daytime nightmare, in which the subway car ahead of mine explodes. My fellow riders and I look at one another, then look again at the burning car ahead, certain of our deaths. The fire comes closer, and what I feel is bitterness and sorrow that it's all ending so soon: no more books, no more love, no more jokes, no more Schubert, no more Black Star. All this spins through my mind on tranquil mornings as the D train trundles between 36th Street and Atlantic Avenue and bored commuters check their phones. They just want to get to work. I sit rigid in my seat, thinking, I don't want to die, not here, not yet. I imagine those in northwest Pakistan or just outside Sana'a who go about their day thinking the same. The difference for some of them is that the plane is already hovering in the air, ready to strike.
First published at http://dennisloo.com. ;
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
