I wasn’t so long ago that ‘death squads’, shadowy groups that murdered enemies of a government, used to be the prerogative of despised authoritarian governments, usually in developing countries. But that has changed.
It is truly a sad reflection on the state of discourse in the US that what enrages our elites is not the fact that the US government has a ‘kill list’ of enemies and a sophisticated system for murdering the people on the list, but the fact that knowledge of this program has become public.
(This clip appeared on June 13, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
And that the leaks are thought of as making Obama “look good”.
I can’t watch the video, but I’m hoping this doesn’t mean that Jon Stewart will be killed. As much as I disagree with him on economic issues, I’m far happier with him alive than dead.
Be sure to let him know that there are still a few countries not subject to drone flights which he can escape to.
I completely misunderstood the title of this post. A-heh.
Got you to click below the fold, didn’t it?
And why is this a surprise? Everyone knows the attacks happen, so it just makes sense that the decisions might be made at presidential briefings where names are arranged on a list.
If the US “thinks” it has the right to kill people it labels as “terrorists” arbitrarily without trial via machine, then other countries naturally have the same right to do that to US citizens and government. By doing this, the US is making the 9/11 attacks look less like terrorism and more like punishment of US policy. In Osama bin Laden’s mind, that’s what it was.
The US should not be surprised if Al Qaeda says that IEDs which kill US occupation forces are equally justified. They certainly are on the same plane of immorality.
Just wait until Iran or someone else makes their own functional drones, and see the US lead the fight to get the UN to sanction them for using them. Then we’ll see how history looks at Obama’s use of them.
And the end game of the administrations response? The folks who leaked this must be punished.
Sound like anything else we’ve heard recently? Hmmm? How about the Vatican?
There’s a passage from Orwell’s Animal Farm that comes to mind, let me go find it…
“No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”