Terror in the Mirror

[Peter Lemkin]

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Terror in the Mirror

By William Boardman
General News 4/27/2013 at 19:32:35 [/TD]
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Farea Al-Muslimi,Drone Killings in Yemen, and Our Presidential Terrorist






Burning Drone in Effigy by (theatlantic.com)




Who Are TheTerrorists, And Can You Know One When You See One?
How is President Obama NOT a terrorist, like President Bushand other presidents before him?

What does it mean to be a terrorist? Isn't someone who commits or colludesin a terrorist act quite simply a terrorist?
What is a terrorist act? Isn't a terrorist act an act of violence designed to murder,main, and terrorize civilians?
Is there a difference between a terrorist act and an act ofwar? Not necessarily. The bombing of London 1941 andHiroshima 1945 were acts of war, and they were both terrorist acts. The former failed, the lattersucceeded, and the ripples of nuclear terror continue spreading almost 70 yearslater.
American drones, Reapers and Predators especially, areweapons of terror. Sometimes theyare aimed at specific targets, sometimes they hit those targets, and sometimesthey kill indiscriminately. Peopleon the ground can hear or see the drones, but can't know what the drones willdo, and that uncertainty gives drones their power to terrorize.
Even unarmed surveillance drones terrorize populationsbelow, who have no way of knowing if unarmed drones are armed or not.
What TerroristWouldn't Love to Have a Drone Fleet?
The drone is the American government terrorist's weapon ofchoice in recent years. Governmentofficials have said they like it because they can target particular individualswho pose some real or imagined threat to the U.S. They don't say, although it appears to be true, that theyalso like killer drones because even when they miss their target and onlyachieve wanton killing, that "protects" Americans, too.
American government terrorists have used lethal drones tokill people abroad for a decade or more. The government still keeps much of the drone program secret, especiallythe actual results of drone strikes. It seems actual carnage, actual dead women and actual dead babies, mightundercut widespread popular support for drone killings that are believed to be highlyselective and accurate in taking out our legitimate enemies, and only our legitimateenemies.
Most of Congress has apparently felt that way and stilldoes. Until recently, no Senate orHouse committee had held a single public hearing to find out just what theprogram of presidential assassination-by-drone was, much less why it was rightor even legal for the executive branch to execute people, based on secret"evidence," without due process that included a trial or verdict.
Finally, on April 23, 2013, the Senate Judiciary Committee'ssubcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, chaired byDemocratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, held a hearing entitled "DroneWars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing." The hearing began at 4 p.m.
The Executive BranchChose Not To Talk About its Acts of Terror
Even though this was the first ever public Congressionalhearing on "Drone Wars," the Obama administration chose not toparticipate. And the Senate chosenot to issue any subpoenas to compel executive branch testimony.
The Senate did postpone the hearing once, to give theadministration more time to prepare a witness. In the end, all the White House contributed was an emailfrom a National Security Council spokes woman that said in part that the WhiteHouse would work:
"to ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution ofterrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances,but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and theworld."
The hearing's six witnesses included three retired militaryofficers, two lawyers, one think tank director, and a Yemeni journalist whotestified to how wonderfully his life was changed by a U.S. State Dept.exchange program that brought him from a remote mountain village to spend hissenior year in high school in southern California.
How Does a YemeniFeel When His Home Village is Bombed?

The journalist is Farea al-Muslimi, who lives and works nowin Sana'a, the Yemeni capitol, located about a nine hour drive north of hishome village of Wessab. In his testimony, he said,
"Just six days ago, myvillage was struck by an American drone in an attack that terrified theregion's poor farmers".
"I could never haveimagined that the same hand that changed my life and took it from miserable topromising one would also drone my village. My understanding is that a man namedHammed al-Radmi was the target of a drone strike. Many people in Wessab knowal-Radmi, and the Yemeni government could easily have found and arrested him.Al-Radmi was well known to government officials, and even to localgovernment--and even local government could have captured him if the U.S. hadtold them to do so.
"In the past, whatWessab's villagers knew of the U.S. was based on my stories about my wonderfulexperiences here. The friendships and values I experienced and described to thevillagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love. Now,however, when they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from thedrones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time. Whatthe violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strikeaccomplished in an instant. There is now an intense anger against America inWessab."
Farea al-Muslimi first wrote about the attack on Wasseb,that killed five alleged militants, the following day in the new mediawebsite Al Monitor that centers on Middle East news. The video of al-Muslimi'sfive and a half minutes of Senate testimony has gone viral on YouTube.
It's Not That WeShouldn't Dismember People, It's That We Do It Properly
Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks, who served as thePentagon's special coordinator for rule of law and humanitarian policy duringObama's first administration, testified somewhat gingerly at the same hearingthat:
"" right now we have the executive branchmaking a claim that it has the right to kill anyone anywhere on earth at anytime for secret reasons based on secret evidence in a secret process undertakenby unidentified officials. That frightens me.
"I don't doubt theirgood faith, but that's not the rule of law as we know it."
Why a former Obama administration official was talking abouther own fear was not explored. Butsomething else al-Muslimi said helped put the lawyer's fears in fuller perspective:
"The drone strikes arethe face of America to many Yemenis. I have spoken to many victims of U.S.drone strikes, like a mother in Jaar who had to identify her innocent18-year-old son's body through a video in a stranger's cellphone, or the fatherin Shaqra who held his four- and six-year-old children as they died in hisarms.
"Recently in Aden, Ispoke with one of the tribal leaders present in 2009 at the place where theU.S. cruise missiles targeted the village of al-Majalah in Lawdar, Abyan. Morethan 40 civilians were killed, including four pregnant women.
"The tribal leader andothers tried to rescue the victims, but the bodies were so decimated that itwas impossible to differentiate between those of children, women and theiranimals. Some of these innocent people were buried in the same grave as theiranimals."
Who Cares What BlowsYou Up, Once You're Blown Up?
But wait, some might say, cruise missiles are different frommissiles from drones, and technically that's correct. It's also morally meaningless. The remote killing of civilians remains an act of terror,and a war crime, and it really doesn't matter if drone missile s have less explosive power andtherefore kill innocent people at a slower rate.
These days, in America, drone wars are not part of a moraldebate. Discussion of anonymouskilling from the air has raised a debate about technicalities, sometimesimportant technicalities of ordnance, tactics, law, and constitutionality.

If the debate were about morality, we'd admit that ourcountry commits terrorist acts with relative impunity -- and then we'd considerwhether that's the country we want to go on being.
Terrorism is generally thought to be a weapon of the weak,but there's no inherent reason it can't work even more effectively for thestrong, at least in the short term. Especially when thestrong have the media ability to redefine their terrorist acts as "targetedkillings" or, better, "signature strikes."
What's good about the "war on terrorism" (for America) isthat it's a war we can't lose. Thoseforeign terrorists, no matter how you add them up, cannot become an existentialthreat to the United States. Theydon't have the numbers or the resources.
So why does the U.S. pursue fundamentally impotent enemieswith such implacable ferocity? Especially, why does the U.S. pursue terrorists in ways that create moreterrorists than we kill?
Or is that the point?
What if the Point ofthe War on Terror is to Sustain the War on Terror?
Since 9/11 our government, with the consent of all too manyof the governed, has taken us down the road of permanent war against anabstraction -- terrorism -- rooted in a racist premise, that the terrorists aremostly Arabs or Muslims or some sort of poor, brown people.
They envy us our freedoms, as some like to say, withapparently unintended irony, since the course of permanent war abroad has beenaccompanied by a permanent state of security at home that looks more and morelike the latest incarnation of a police state.
That enlarged authoritarian presence in our lives likelycontributes to concern about the constitution and the rule of law -- even whenthose concerned ignore the rule of lawlessness in places like Yemen. Taking this situation as a whole, theconstitution looks more and more like collateral damage.
On its face, American anti-terrorism terrorism is insanelystupid in its ineffectual circularity. Or is it fiendishly clever, however planned orunplanned, in its seemingly infinite self-perpetuation?
When our President and our government commit terrorist acts,they do so partly in our name. When our Congressmen and our Senators seek to justify the government'sterrorist acts, or to cover them over with a transparent film of legality, theydo so partly in our name. When ourjudges allow the terrorist acts of the American government to go unchallengedand unaccountable, they do so partly in our name.
These are the fundamental elements of our three-branch governmentconspiring to commit terrorist acts around the world, thereby making us allterrorists, except those who resist.