If violence is wrong in Baltimore, it is wrong when the government uses it as well.
While we were distracted by all the police violence going on (or more accurately, I should say brought to light by the video cell phone age), it was revealed that the government was randomly killing people. A headline in the New York Times screamed, “Drone Strikes Reveal Uncomfortable Truth: U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die.”
That’s right. As another article put it, the U.S. does not know who it’s killing with their drone strikes.
That the U.S. didn’t know who it was killing means, in other words, that any Muslim would do. The casualness of the killing is amazing, and the fact that there has been little buzz about it in the U.S. corporate press is absolutely incredible. It’s especially striking considering all the handwringing and finger-pointing at rebelling Black inner-city youth who are justifiably outraged at the idea that their lives don’t count, and their government either can’t or won’t protect them from police terror.
The U.S. press has been so busy trying to portray the inner-city victims as criminals and letting the “real” criminals off that they barely mention this criminal behavior by the U.S. abroad. The fact that the U.S. is randomly killing Muslims would not have come to light had it not been revealed that a drone strike killed two hostages.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had assured the world that the drones were being used carefully. “The only people that we fire a drone at are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level after a great deal of vetting that takes a long period of time. We don’t just fire a drone at somebody and think they’re a terrorist,” Kerry said at a BBC forum in 2013.
But that’s exactly what they are doing!
The facts and the government’s own recent revelations prove that they lied about the accuracy as well as the effectiveness of drone strikes. More importantly, they knew it was a lie when they told it.
Worse yet, in Pakistan 24 men specifically targeted by the CIA’s drone warfare resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. Either the government missed their intended target or it really didn’t matter who they killed. Around 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men.
That’s a lot of misses, unless they didn’t really miss! Either way it’s reckless. Human life is sacred and should be given more consideration than that.
The U.S. has this easily duped population believing that, for no reason at all, folks in the Middle East simply hate this government. In reality the opposite is true: The U.S. is at war with the Muslim world. They are intentionally provoking the Muslim world to give the U.S. an opportunity, a rationale for making war on the entire Middle East, which drone attacks are not so subtly doing.
So how does the U.S. justify killing people without due process abroad, while at home the president calls people throwing stones and stealing haircare products thugs? Those rebelling didn’t kill anyone even though they would have more justification, because the U.S. is killing folks who haven’t shot at or attacked them.
Wrong is wrong, and when it comes to wrong the U.S. government has cornered the market, not poor inner-city children who have been planned out of the so-called American Dream.
Mel Reeves welcomes reader responses to mellaneous19@yahoo.com.
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