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Targeted Killings with Drones legal defence AG Eric Holder
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Can you explain the conspiracy theory to me on this one?
Ok, here goes. It's complicated but explainable (and it ain't no theory!)
It is generally agreed that neo-conservatives with a very hawkish agenda spread throughout the power structure of Washington greatly impacted US foreign policy after the event of 9/11.
A long story short, a 'War on Terror' was declared which allowed some very questionable US actions to get through congress and the public on the back of anger and a hyper-patriotic culture of vengeance which focused on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and anywhere where he or 'they' could possibly be hiding.
As the military action increased, suddenly, so obviously did the military budget reaching a peak of $700 Billion directly as a result of the actions which were pushed and subsequently sanctioned on the back of the event of 9/11 including the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan to punish that country for apparently hiding 'Al Qaeda' and then they used the momentum of that and the irrational fear subsequently generated... to 'DO' Iraq .... which has comprehensively been agreed at this point to have been a total and complete ridiculous heap of hairy bullsh1t : )
Whichever way you feel about all this doesn't matter, as the military budget and the military actions just got completely out of control either way and the whole situation was irrational.. and not simply based on military strategy, which at least is purely logic based. Instead, as the US-made mess in the mid-east worsened, the Internal Politics of the US had huge impacts on the situation…. Which is bad..ok
Firstly, OBL couldn't be found anywhere and as he was singled out as THE MAIN BAD GUY (straight out of a bad 80's movie) to the angry and confused American public - THEY HAD to kill him... it was imperative.
American casualty numbers became more and more of an issue as they increased from hundreds to a few thousand (we'll ignore the many tens of thousands of dead Iraqi innocent men women and children for now). So how do you fight an entrenched chaotically thinly spread group of US-Hatin jihadists in their own backyard without losing US lives (God forbid lives got lost in an absolutely essential pre-emptive war of purely self-defence... Jesus this crap doesn’t even sound grammatically acceptable anymore) Anyway it’s Very simple, you just take them out. No questions, no court case, no gun fights... just destroy them and anyone who looks like them, as they say and you do it in a way that the news media will care less about, be unable to investigate certainly for a long while anyway and in a way which is completely unaccountable and under a narrow executive control which allows absolutely no transparency or oversight and thus cannot be verified as to be acting within international law let alone within reasonable boundaries of morality… which I suppose would be sort of expected by the shining exemplary pinnacle of western civilisation… the United States of America.
The original groups of hawks and individual hawks who saw/see the US, as the ruling nation of the empire, and one which because it HAS the power to construct a favourable global reality, it MUST DO SO!.. seized the opportunity to act out these deep beliefs and use advanced dominating military strength all the way to... and then right past.. levels of acceptability...and right past normatives which had been generally agreed on for a hundred years by literally the whole world.
This total dominance on the battlefield created a situation conducive to OVERKILL. They were Gods and could do what they liked. Night raids became an increasingly big part of the 'efforts' in Afghanistan and they increased in frequency to the level of 10-20 special ops raids every single night. Originally, publicly argued as a tactic to reduce civilian casualties which would be greater during daytime, these night raid kill/capture missions killed a couple thousand individuals, some of which were militants, some of which were Al Qaeda and the rest, obviously were those pesky civilians that just keep getting in the dam way! Various KILL/Capture lists were drawn up and raids were carried out in a manner which pretty much ‘guaranteed’ the killing of whoever was there. Think about a lawless tribal country, arse deep in proxy war for decades, and think how likely it is you would own an AK-47, and how likely it would be you would grab said AK-47 whenst you doth hear the lovely sound of a black hawk landing on an adjacent roof, packed with blacked out kill squads... you grab your gun - you die two seconds later... camera phone pic CLICK ...one more off the list...nicely done boys, home in time to catch Leno on the Sat TV.
Another 'totally legal
method of NEUTRALISING ENEMY COMBATANTS IN THIS ALL-OUT TOTALLY DEFENSIVE ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and MORALLY DIVEN WAR ON TERROR is, to shoot supersonic Hellfire Missiles at bunches of people, from flying robots in the sky.
These are called 'Drone strikes' or 'Targeted Killings' or 'Lethal Actions' or 'Signature Strikes'.... Jesus they must have a guy employed JUST to come up with these cool terms. It wasn't possible to do these 'strrrrrr-ikes' before coz well, basically the robots were a bit sh1t and they hadn't given General Dynamics gazillions of dollars yet to make HUNDREDS of them which of course would require congress to agree on their procurement which would mean there would have to be a part in the budget for them which would mean you'd have to PROVE how 'effective' they are. (Think Roy's argument to Kingpin " Who's done more research on the subject than the good people at the American Tobacco Industry? They say it's harmless. Why would they lie? If you're dead, you can't smoke. ")
Basically some war-hungry dudes with very extreme notions of US destiny influenced the executive to use no-risk killer drones to blow people up every couple days for the last 7+ years in Waziristan in Pakistan against the wishes of the Pakistani public creating MORE terrorism within Pakistan in the form of suicide bombings and the whole thing has been non-democratic in nature, completely unaccountable, ‘outside’ of international laws and normatives and totally disproportionate and arguably counter-productive. The conspiracy is that individuals and groups of individuals from heads of various parts of JSOC, CIA, Justice Dept, SOCOM and within the Executive itself all the way up to Eric Holder and Obama himself have been pushing these strikes even though THEY ABSOLUTELY KNOW 100% that if the American Congress, Public, International Community and World’s Media KNEW the actual details of- HOW these strikes began,
- WHO they’ve targeted,
- WHY they’ve targeted individuals,
- HOW they’ve reached the ‘LETHAL ACTION DECISION’ on individual basis
- THE UNDERSTOOD RISKS before PRE-MEDITATED ASSASSINATIONS of individuals which caused UNACCEPTABLE CIVILIAN COLLATERAL DAMAGE,
- The PURE ILLEGALITY of many strikes,
- THE NAMES OF ACTUAL INDIVIDUALS WHO SANCTIONED THE FINAL GREEN LIGHTS ,
- THE CARTE BLANCHE ‘ARRANGED’ within Congress to limit oversight to literally only ‘TRUST US IT’S FINE’
- The role of ACTUAL DOMESTIC POLITICAL EVENTS in the increase of the use of this Extrajudicial Assassination program and all of those sweet internal memo’s that if you could get your mitts on would wrap this whole thing up in a carpet and land a loada mother fcukers in jail!
Does anyone want to sign this?
http://www.change.org/petitions/international-community-united-nations-and-united-states-congress-make-targeted-killing-internationally-accountable0 -
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