If the government were to acknowledge the reality, which is that by unilaterally going out and killing people abroad in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, the US is inviting inevitable retaliation in kind back here in the "homeland," one has to hope that some Americans would start to question the wisdom of such an aggressive policy.
I raised this question two years ago when the Pentagon decided, instead of decommissioning an obsolete US Naval Air Station in Horsham, PA, just a couple of miles from where I live, to convert it into a drone piloting base, where US Navy Reserve personnel could put in their service commitment hours piloting deadly drones in Pakistan and elsewhere. As I wrote after interviewing military law specialists, including some at the US War College, that drone base near me, because it was launching strikes abroad, had become a front line in America's wars. Not only was the base itself a "legitimate target" now for anyone from the targeted countries who might try to put a stop to the attacks, but the pilots and personnel on the base would be legitimate targets, and not just while they were in uniform and on the base, but even when they punched out and got in their cars and drove home to be with their families in the evening.
A soldier is a soldier, I was told.
And here's the kicker. If some foreign fighter decided to attack one of those drone pilots by pulling an explosives-laden truck up to her or his house and detonating it, blowing up perhaps four homes and some passing cars, that would be a "legitimate act of war," if the target was the pilot. Anyone else killed in the attack would be "collateral damage" as long as they were not deliberately targeted.
So this is the real world our brilliant leaders in Washington have created.
I'd guess, as long as it continues -- and there's no indication that this crazy US "War on Terror" is going to be ended anytime soon -- these kinds of attacks like Chattanooga are going to continue, or even increase in number, and what the Pentagon likes to call the "collateral damage" of such attacks will no doubt increase too.
Better that we start calling them what they are: acts of war.
As long as we diminish them by calling them acts of terrorism, nobody's going to demand a halt to the War on Terror. And that "war" is the real act of terrorism, when you come right down to it.
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, unccompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LORI SPENCER, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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