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Obama institutionalizes state assassinations
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Oct 27, 2012 12:05am |
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| Category | Commentary |
| Author | Bill Van Auken |
| News Date | Thursday, October 25, 2012 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | While the administration and its apologists routinely justify the drone assassinations as necessary to defend the US from terrorist attacks, in reality, the great majority of those killed in Pakistan are targeted for resisting the US occupation of neighboring Afghanistan, while in Yemen they are killed for opposing the US-backed regime there.
In both countries, the US military and the CIA increasingly carry out what are known as “signature strikes,” in which the identity of those to be killed is not known—much less whether they are plotting against the US. Rather, they are targeted for patterns of activity that supposedly make them suspect.
The Post article stresses “the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”
Last May, the New York Times published a lengthy article describing how Obama held weekly meetings at the White House with military and intelligence officials—so-called “terror Tuesdays”—to pore over biographies and mug shots of potential victims and decide which ones to place on the “kill list.” It established that Obama personally approved every strike in Yemen and Somalia, as well as at least a third of those carried out in Pakistan. A top security official described the US president as “quite comfortable” with deciding who should die. |
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