The association fallacy (all males of military age killed are terrorists), also known as guilt by association.
US policy is thus based on a naked fallacy: "an argument (generally considered a logical fallacy) that draws a conclusion from inconsistent or incompatible premises. Essentially, a proposition is contradictory when it asserts and denies the same thing." To assert that killing a person because he is in a combat zone and therefore an enemy militant while at the same time asserting that same person, when he provides information that leads to military action against his enemies, is a valid source is the mother of all fallacies, a self-contradictory premise.
That the government operates according to this fallacy, and the media accept it without question, is the ideological foundation of the US War on Terror. It is the intellectual underpinning of our foreign policy, which is focused on eliminating terrorists (except in nations like Yemen where the enemy is the #1 enemy of ISIS), or at least pretends to.
We know from released CIA documents that the US has supported the establishment of a caliphate in Syria in order to take down Assad. In this case, the War on Terror contradicts the US policy of supporting the terrorists for the purpose of regime change, which is a feature of US hegemony.
Syrian young men: terrorists or humanitarian workers or activist journalists or all three?
This use of the self-contradictory assumptions concerning whether those in rebel territory, which the US has supported as a means of regime change, are enemy or reliable sources of information, is mirrored in the contradictory policy of both supporting terrorism when it serves our purposes (world domination) and opposing it when it threatens US hegemony. In other words, US policy is based on the premise of all absurdity, the belief not only in the impossible but in the contradictory. And it is the embrace of this absurdity which justifies the certainty with which a person of military age in a strike zone is justifiably killed as a "militant" and at the same time makes that person, when reporting on the activities of his enemies, a reliable source.
Such is the rotten foundation, based on the blatant absurdities and contradictions that guide our foreign policy and our military logic. The result of this absurd logic is death and destruction, the killing of children, criminal wars, and a world of deceit and violence.
All genocides are based on guilt by association. US policy regarding the murder of terrorists is based on this fallacy. It is a portal that leads to mass murder, justified by the fallacy of association--garbage in/garbage out. The doctrine that all males of military age (which goes up to 55) in a "strike zone" are militants and a just target for killing is a form of gender genocide. You are not killed because you are a terrorist; you are a terrorist because you are killed.
"War is madness, but we do what we must." LBJ
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