The Obama administration’s authorization of drone attacks — initiated by his Bush predecessor — has carried past U.S. murders of innocent workers to a new high. Based on a New York Times analysis (5/29), the Nation of Change (NOC) website reports that the Obama killers “are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17.”
Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, suing the CIA on behalf of drone victims, cites “a program that has existed for eight years, picks its targets in secret, faces zero accountability and has killed almost 3,000 people in Pakistan alone whose identities are not known to their killers,” including “women and children in Waziristan…killed with Hellfire missiles.”
In trying to justify these executions as “limiting civilian death tolls to a minimum,” the Times reported that the CIA simply counts all military-age males in a strike zone as “combatants.” Their rationale is that “people in areas of known ‘terrorist activity’…are probably up to no good.” (Shades of racist George Zimmerman’s “self-defense” claim in murdering Trayvon Martin.)
Obama Gives CIA Greater Kill Potential
In addition to hit lists, “Obama has granted the CIA authority to kill with even greater ease using ‘signature strikes’ — strikes based solely on suspicious behavior.” The Times noted the U.S. State Department’s description of the CIA’s criteria: “The joke was that when the CIA sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bomb makers — but might also be farmers.”
Under such a rationale the NOC website said, “China might declare an ethnic Uighur activist living in New York City as an ‘enemy combatant’ and send a missile into Manhattan; Russia could assert that it was legal to launch a drone attack against someone living in London whom they claim is linked to Chechen militants. Or consider the case of Luis Posada Carrilles, a Cuban-American living in Miami who is a known terrorist convicted of masterminding a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people….The Cuban government could claim that it has the right to send a drone into downtown Miami to kill an admitted terrorist and sworn enemy.”
The NOC website says, “The kind of ‘intelligence’ used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of ‘intelligence’ that put people in Guantanamo….Hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the U.S. military by bounty hunters.”
Obama’s Killer List may very well be part of his presidential campaign to portray his “tough leadership,” not being a shrinking violet when it comes to killing. Of course, this drone campaign is only a part of capitalism’s death and destruction through imperialist wars, mass racist unemployment, poverty, periodic Great Recessions, racist cops and other horrors. All the more reason to destroy it with communist revolution that puts the bosses six feet under and the working class in control of our future.
