by Stephen Lendman

Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and Charles Schumer (D-NY), spearheading warmongering resolution that could detonate a Mideast war 1000 times more vicious than recent ones. War criminals by any standard.

Permanent war is official US policy. Bipartisan complicity supports it. Doing so violates international, constitutional and US statute laws. America is a lawless rogue state. It’s been so for decades. It’s by far the world’s worst. It wages war on humanity. It does it at home and abroad.

Innocent victims are murdered in cold blood. It’s official policy. So are other high crimes.

Political Washington is beholden to dominant monied interests, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, and Israeli Lobby extremists. AIPAC represents their face.

It’s an unregistered foreign agent. It’s represented Israel since 1953. It does so lawlessly. Virtually no one in Congress confronts it. Doing so assures short careers. It has enormous influence over US Middle East policies. They affect Israel, war, peace, and humanity.

It disseminates disinformation, lies and hate. It viciously attacks opponents. It’s a cancer in our midst. It destroys fundamental freedoms. It maliciously calls Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and is racing toward a nuclear weapons capability.”

It manufactures threats to promote fear. It wants the Islamic Republic destroyed. It targets other regional states. It wants unchallenged Israeli regional dominance. Its annual conferences reflect out-of-control Zionist influence over US foreign policy. It calls them “the largest gathering of the pro-Israel movement.”

A rogue’s gallery of participants show up. They express fealty to what demands condemnation. AIPAC’s 2013 conference will be held from March 3 – 5. Washington again is venue. AIPAC calls it “three of the most important days affecting Israel’s future.” Its theme is “Shaping Tomorrow Together.”

Thousands are expected to attend. Doing so shames anyone showing up. Caterpillar will participate in a panel discussion. It topic is “Foreign Aid: The Vital Role of US Assistance.” It’s scheduled days before the tenth anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s murder. One of its giant bulldozers crushed her to death. It did so in cold blood.

A soldier/operator ran her down twice. He did so to be sure she was dead. Caterpillar shares guilt. It supplies giant bulldozers. They’re designed to destroy and kill. Its Washington Director for Government Affairs, Bill Lane, will pay homage to AIPAC and Israel. It’s no surprise.

Profits matter more than principle. Caterpillar’s bottom line is served. It’s boosted by terrorizing Palestinians. It’s longstanding company policy. Occupy AIPAC will be back. CODEPINK, Interfaith Peace Builders, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and other groups will participate.

Demonstrations and other events are planned. Instituting a new US Middle East policy will be stressed. So will ridding the region of Israeli lawlessness and AIPAC’s sinister influence on Washington. Two senators among others reflect it. Lindsey Graham (R. SC) and Robert Menendez (D. NJ) support war on Iran. Think Progress reported it.

They prepared a joint resolution. It “strongly supports the full implementation of United States and international sanctions on Iran and urge(s) the President to continue to strengthen enforcement of sanctions legislation.” It falsely calls Iran “in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement with the IAEA.” It lied claiming its uranium enrichment is illegal.

It did so again saying it “stands in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” No nation violates fundamental human and civil rights more egregiously than America. It’s official policy.

Both senators want more stringent sanctions imposed. Economic ones on nonbelligerent countries violate international law. They’re used to inflict extreme hardships. They cause ordinary Iranians pain and suffering. They’re not fools. They blame Washington and Israel. They’re Tehran’s main enemies. They’re partnered in seeking Middle East dominance. They commit crimes of war, against humanity, and genocide.

They’re waging lawless war on Syria. The road to Tehran runs through Damascus. Their government is their last line of defense. They support it for good reason. Graham and Menendez falsely accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons.

In December 2012, 74 senators urged Obama “to take military action against Iran if it continues its efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon.”  They want Washington’s European and Middle East partners involved. They want “a credible and capable multilateral coalition” demonstrated. They want a strike commitment ready if necessary.

They support strong military ties to Israel. They back its right to “self-defense”. Israel has no regional enemies except ones it invents. Claiming otherwise is fabricated rubbish. Graham/Menendez’s most disturbing section urges open-ended support if Israel attacks Iran, saying:

Last August, Graham partnered with Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns. They said they’d introduce their resolution in September. They sought Democrat co-sponsors. Nothing happened. Graham/Menendez’s resolution exceeds last year’s. It backs an Israeli strike. It’s bipartisan. It’s non-binding.

Its threatening posture is troubling. Words can become policy. Bipartisan complicity targets Iran. Obama declared all options open. Attacking preemptively may follow. On February 27, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce (R. CA) and Eliot Engel (D. NY) sponsored the “Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013.”

It toughens economic sanctions. It increases oversight over current ones. It states US policy prioritizes preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. It falsely calls Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). It’s other provisions turn truth on its head. It’s coupled with Graham/Menendez.

It gives pause to what Obama/Netanyahu have in mind. They’ll meet later in Israel. March is scheduled. It’s flexible. Expect plans to be finalized once Israel’s new government is formed. War remains an option. Obama said so numerous times. In March 2012, he addressed AIPAC’s annual conference.

He said “no Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that….threatens to wipe Israel off the map and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”

He lied. Iran seeks peace. It threatens no one. Obama knows it. So does Israel. False accusations follow often. He told AIPAC participants he’ll “use force when the time and circumstances demand it.”

“I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power (including) a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.”

“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment. I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

“And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

For the first in seven years, no US president or Israeli prime minister will attend AIPAC’s conference. Why they’ll have to explain. Biden will represent Obama. Netanyahu will speak by video message. Outgoing Defense Minister Ehud Barak will attend.

AIPAC plans focusing on congressional legislation. It wants Israel designated a “major (US) strategic ally.”   It wants status beyond what’s offered other nations. It wants America agreeing to strike Iran. If binding legislation authorizes it, all bets are off. What follows bears watching.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

By David Sirota

As you know if you’ve paid attention to recent news, drone war proponents are currently facing inconvenient truths. This month, for instance, they are facing a new United Nations report showing that President Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan War – which is defined, in part, by an escalation in drone airstrikes – is killing hundreds of children “due notably to reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force.” They are also facing news that the rise in drone strikes is accompanying a rise in al-Qaida recruits, proving that, in predictable “blowback” fashion, the attacks may be creating more terrorists than they are neutralizing.

Drone-war cheerleaders will no doubt find this news difficult to explain away on the merits. And so many are trying to change the linguistic foundation of the discourse from one rooted in fact to one rooted in a sophistry that narrows the public’s perception of available choices.

Sen. Angus King’s (I-Maine) comments justifying the drone war last week exemplify the talking points.

“Drones are a lot more civilized than what we used to do,” he told a cable television audience. “I think it’s actually a more humane weapon because it can be targeted to specific enemies and specific people.”

Designed to obscure mounting civilian casualties, King’s Orwellian phrase “humane weapon” is the crux of the larger argument. The idea is that an intensifying drone war is necessary – and even humane! – because it is more surgical than violent global ground war, which is supposedly America’s only other option.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks summed it up: drone strikes are great because “they inflict fewer civilian deaths than bombing campaigns, boots on the ground or any practical alternative.” Or, as one drone-war defender put it on Twitter: “Drones? 160,000 pairs of boots on the ground? Hmm.”

In a country whose culture so often (wrongly) portrays bloodshed as the most effective problem solver, many Americans hear this now-ubiquitous drone-war argument and reflexively agree with its suppositions. Having been told in so many ways that killing is the best and only possible policy prescription, most simply assume that our only national security choice is between drone wars and ground wars – between different forms of preemptive violence, and nothing else.

The failure to question such an assumption represents what can be accurately described as a fundamentalist religion. After all, if faith is the belief in something without proof, then refusing to question martial assumptions represents a theology of militarism. And it’s not just any such theology – but one so willfully blind that it will not allow the realities of blowback and civilian casualties to shape its catechism.

It will not permit, in other words, a discussion of what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calls the other alternative.

“We can be a nation that declares its war over, that declares itself at peace and goes about rigorously and energetically using intelligence and diplomacy and well-resourced police work to protect us from future attacks,” he suggests.

By deliberately ignoring this particular option, drone-war proponents who employ choice-narrowing language are the militarist dogma’s most destructive evangelists.

At a moment when we should be having a broader conversation about alternatives to permanent war, they are preventing that conversation from even starting. In the process, they are precluding America from making more prudent, informed and dispassionate national security decisions – the kind that might stop us from repeating the worst mistakes of our own history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover,” “The Uprising” and “Back to Our Future.” E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

 

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The imperial offensive in North Africa and Syria “was designed to put a Euro-American spin on the momentum of change” with the advent of the Arab Spring. But it has actually empowered Islamist forces and their royal Persian Gulf patrons. This house of cards must ultimately collapse.

“Although the NATO powers account for about 70 percent of total worldwide arms spending, they are by no means fully in charge of their own offensive in North Africa and the Middle East.”

The French intervention in Mali and the deadly Salafist assault on an Algerian natural gas facility on the border with Libya reveal the deepening crisis of U.S. and European imperialism in northern Africa. What is playing out in the western Sahel is the direct, and broadly predictable, result of the aggressive Euro-American response to the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring.

Two years ago, Washington, Paris and London were swept by panic at the prospect of a realignment of forces in the Arab world. With Egypt’s Mubarak on the way out, the West’s henchman in Tunisia overthrown, and America’s warlord in Yemen facing opposition from all quarters, the NATO powers decided to alter the regional chessboard to what they thought would be their own advantage with a mass application of force against Libya. The assault on Muammar Gaddafi’s government, with absolutely no provocation and no basis in international law, was designed to put a Euro-American spin on the momentum of change. Almost simultaneously, Syria was targeted for massive subversion, and it was universally assumed that Algeria was next on the hit list.

This scheme for wholesale game-changer in the region necessitated an even deeper alliance with the royal regimes of the Persian Gulf. In practice, it was the West that became dependent on the Saudis and Qataris to provide Arab cover for NATO’s military and, much more importantly, to provide the Islamist fighters who would actually seize power on the ground in Libya and then Syria and beyond. Moreover, the Saudis and Qataris are rich, and can afford to pursue their own political objectives.

“The Islamists hate them with far more intensity than the secular leftists and Arab nationalists that the U.S. and Europe are so keen to destroy.”

This fundamental reordering of the relationship between the West and its royalist Arab allies is reflected on the ground in Libya, where it is Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s Islamist friends who wield the guns. The real crisis in Benghazi was that the Islamist fighters for whom NATO had provided an air force were not totally dependent on the U.S., Britain and France. They have rich friends in the Persian Gulf, on whom the West is now also dependent. Although the NATO powers account for about 70 percent of total worldwide arms spending, they are by no means fully in charge of their own offensive in North Africa and the Middle East. The Islamist fighters and their Persian Gulf patrons have their own agendas.

Ultimately, the Pentagon and the CIA and their counterparts in Europe cannot win this game. They are racist imperialists who will always make themselves hated. Certainly, the Islamists hate them with far more intensity than the secular leftists and Arab nationalists that the U.S. and Europe are so keen to destroy. That’s why the Americans can’t operate safely in Benghazi.

The great contradiction is that the Islamic fundamentalism with which the West is now allied and critically dependent behaves, in practice, like a nationalism without borders. And, like nationalism, it is ultimately incompatible with imperialism, which today is corporate rule without borders.

The fighters that attacked the gas facility in secular-ruled Algeria surely entered through Libya, partially controlled by fellow Islamists who are friends with the guys who killed the U.S. ambassador, and who are also friends with the Saudis and Qataris who are supposed to be America’s allies. The Arab Spring is far from played out, and nowhere near under U.S. control. For the West, it will end in a huge implosion, because this house of cards cannot stand.

•
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Preliminary Note: Concerning Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT), a film we have criticized numerous times (just do a search of our database and you’ll easily find a bunch of splendid articles on the topic) we are happy to see that, at last, a growing number of influential critics in the mainstream media—like Daniel Froomkin (see below)—is denouncing this film for the artistic travesty it is.  Their main objection stems from ZDT’s sneaky endorsement of torture, the old “necessary evil” argument, and we couldn’t agree more. ZDT, fireworks and (plentiful) conceits aside, is a dishonest movie.  It deserves to receive fire. That said, we regret to see that none of these critics pays much attention to ZDT (and ARGO) as representatives of a new type of cinematic propaganda, the kind of propaganda suited to a late-stage capitalism, where the manipulation of the audience’s emotions has reached an incredibly sophisticated (and equivocal) level.  We think this angle deserves more exploration.  At some point perhaps it will come.  Meantime, will these negative reviews make a difference where it matters, in the language Hollywood moguls understand? We don’t know.  Maybe yes, more probably not.  ARGO and ZDT are being hailed as masterpieces by most critics.  (Argo already won Critics’ Choice Awards, Globe Award, etc.).  Still such films deserve to be excoriated, if only to piss in the parade of sycophants and film illiterates already elevating these vehicles to the stature of great cinema, which most certainly they are not.

Incidentally, while we’re hardly in the business of tooting our own horn, we can’t resist noting that it was The Greanville Post that published the first reviews blasting ZDT (back on Dec. 3), and ARGO (Oct. 9, 2012), for flying well below the moral radar. Both pieces were penned by TGP’s editor in chief Patrice Greanville.  In both cases Greanville also recommended a box-office boycott, a position I find reasonable and consistent with the vileness at the core of these films. Referring to ARGO, he argued, “There are films that simply should not be made, and this is clearly one of them. The historical context in which a work of mass communication is created and distributed should be taken into account by morally responsible artists. It rarely is…Argo is bad because it is a toxic social product. By raising still higher the probability of a horrendous war in the Gulf, by glorifying what Western intelligence agencies actually do in our name, Affleck and Clooney are not doing us any favors, and no amount of entertainment can justify such undertakings.” In his similarly scathing critique of ZDT he called director Kathryn Bigelow America’s own “Leni Riefenstahl.” He may have been a tad too generous. In any case, see what you think. You can read the reviews below. —Sean Lenihan, Assoc. Editor

ZERO DARK THIRTY—More “Patriotic” Offal from Hollywood: Bigelow Strikes Again

ARGO: Ben Affleck’s latest film may whitewash CIA history_

____________________________________________

Zero Dark Thirty Is a Despicable Movie, Even if Bigelow and Boal Didn’t Intend It That Way

Daniel Froomkin
I finally saw Zero Dark Thirty last night, which according to my film critic friends means that only now am I actually allowed to opine on it. (I don’t agree, having Tweeted up a storm about its evidently pro-torture ethos already.)

Since a lot has been said by now, here are just a few observations:

Torture is much more central to the movie even than I had been led to believe. Not only does the very first scene depict torture, but it does so partly in the name of character development for our gorgeous red-headed hero, showing how tough she is. Literally her first words in the movie are “I’m fine,” which “Maya” says after watching a thug agent savagely beat (and ultimately waterboard) an injured, starved and trussed-up detainee. “I’m fine”? Think about that.

Furthermore, in the movie, absolutely every bit of evidence that leads Maya to the courier who leads her to bin Laden is elicited through, after, and under threat of more torture. She tells the SEAL team near the end of the movie that she is sure of her information because it comes from “detainee reports.” Other agents repeatedly either demand better information from detainees or, later, mope about the loss of what they clearly consider the only effective technique to elicit information. You cannot take this movie at its word and conclude anything other than that torture was an essential step toward tracking bin Laden down. Which it wasn’t.

I asked myself as I watched the movie: So why, then, did director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal decide to make torture such a key element of the plot? There’s been much speculation, including that they were basically punked by the CIA, which still can’t come to terms with the horror of what it did. Some of us have accused them of essentially being pro-torture. Having now seen the movie and pondered it, I doubt Bigelow and Boal set out to make a pro-torture movie. I don’t think they even necessarily think they made a pro-torture movie. I think what happened was, in turning this story into a Hollywood movie, they had to change some facts around to make things work — in particular, to make the audience see its hero as an actual hero. For instance, Maya is obviously a composite: a totally understandable device to make the movie work better.

Here is what I suspect happened regarding torture: The filmmakers recognized that it was an important element of the 10+ year hunt for bin Laden, and that ignoring it completely wasn’t a good option. In reality, torture was a horribly depraved and failed element of that hunt, but once the filmmakers decided it needed to be in the movie — and therefore part of their hero’s adventures — they were in a bind. Could they portray it as not having worked? As just having been an exercise in unjustified and worthless brutality? Then the hero wouldn’t have been so sympathetic; the audience might even be turned off. Could they portray her as having been disgusted by it and protesting it? FBI agents did, in real life, but not CIA, and it would have complicated things. So they had to portray torture as working, just as a plot device. Hollywood heroes can be flawed, but they can’t be war-criminal flawed. So they made a totally pragmatic choice, not a moral one — at least in their mind.

Another question that puzzled me: Why did the filmmakers so clearly depart from reality in their depiction of waterboarding? In the movie, the de facto drowning of the detainee was brutal, but it was also almost spontaneous and improvised. In real life, waterboarding was clinical and methodical. Memos from Cheney’s lawyers described how many ounces per “pour.” They were measured and counted. (That’s how we know KSM got 183 pours.) The detainees were strapped into medical gurneys. There was medical staff in attendance. It was totally regimented and micromanaged by Washington. So why change that? Would that have made our hero even more culpable, going along with something so clearly premeditated and inhumane, rather than just brutal?

It’s a very long movie. A very, very long movie. A very much too long movie. And by the end, torture seems far away. By the third hour, the drama revolves around the tracking down of an unspeakably evil man, and I strongly suspect most members of the audience once they finally leave the theater will be left with the impression that torture was at most a regrettable part of an ultimately successful operation. There is no comeuppance for any of the torturers (that part is true to life). In fact, nobody in the movie even once expresses any doubt about torture or its efficacy.

Another disappointment about the negligent treatment of torture by the filmmakers is that it has created a missed opportunity to discuss the other disturbing elements of the movie — these depicted with great honesty. For instance, the filmmakers accurately recreate a raid that seemed aimed purely to kill, not capture, bin Laden. Similarly, it shows soldiers shooting unarmed wounded men to make sure they are dead, and shooting women and leaving them to die. Those are war crimes. Why wasn’t capture even an option? Daniel Klaidman’s very good and underappreciated book Kill or Capture tried to raise those issues, and this movie should have, as well.

All this “it’s just a movie” bullshit really sticks in my craw. (Former senator now movie-industry whore shill Chris Dodd was hitting this note repeatedly last night.) The film declares itself as based on first-hand accounts, and more to the point, uses the horror over the real 9/11 attacks and the satisfaction over the real killing of bin Laden to heighten its emotional impact. It is clearly trying to exploit and build on personal feelings about things that really happened, so when it departs from reality, that is significant.

It’s true that there are signs that the filmmakers were trying to be at least a bit ambiguous about the whole enterprise. The movie doesn’t end as celebratorily as I had feared. Most notably, there is only one SEAL whooping. And the final image shows Maya in tears. But how the viewers interpret the cause of those tears is significant. I didn’t see Maya as disgusted or remorseful; I saw her as exhausted, relieved, directionless and alone. And still very much  a hero.
At last night’s DC premiere, Bigelow spoke briefly before the movie, and Boal answered some questions from Martha Raddatz afterwards. But I don’t remember hearing either Bigelow or Boal use the word “torture” themselves, in the context of the acts they depicted. Maybe I am wrong, but I do know that Boal at one point spoke about “brutal” interrogations. A quick Google search doesn’t find them using the word to describe what they show in their movie. Not calling obvious, objective torture by its real name is the sign of someone who can’t face what really happened. Waterboarding, most obviously, is an archetypal form of torture. If in fact they are shrinking from calling the obvious torture they depict “torture” then they’ve got a lot of goddamn gall trying to appear like they’re not taking sides.

Do yourself a favor, and don’t go see this movie. Don’t encourage film-making that at best offers ambiguity about torture, and at worst endorses it. Spend the two and a half hours and the $10 on something more valuable, and moral.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Froomkin is also deputy editor of Nieman Watchdog: Questions the press should ask, a blog hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that, according to his account of it, “seeks to encourage more informed reporting by soliciting probing questions from experts.”[7]

Barack Obama’s tears for the children of Newtown are in stark contrast to his silence over the children murdered by his drones

By George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2012 15.30 EST

“Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.” Every parent can connect with what President Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children murdered there by a deranged young man also applies to the children murdered in Pakistan by a sombre American president. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world’s concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them, no pictures on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, no interviews with grieving relatives, no minute analysis of what happened and why.

If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed”. Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back”.

Like George Bush’s government in Iraq, Obama’s administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA’s drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom at least 64 were children. These are figures extracted from credible reports: there may be more which have not been fully documented.

The wider effects on the children of the region have been devastating. Many have been withdrawn from school because of fears that large gatherings of any kind are being targeted. There have been several strikes on schools since Bush launched the drone programme that Obama has expanded so enthusiastically: one of Bush’s blunders killed 69 children.

The study reports that children scream in terror when they hear the sound of a drone. A local psychologist says that their fear and the horrors they witness is causing permanent mental scarring. Children wounded in drone attacks told the researchers that they are too traumatised to go back to school and have abandoned hopes of the careers they might have had. Their dreams as well as their bodies have been broken.

Obama does not kill children deliberately. But their deaths are an inevitable outcome of the way his drones are deployed. We don’t know what emotional effect these deaths might have on him, as neither he nor his officials will discuss the matter: almost everything to do with the CIA’s extrajudicial killings in Pakistan is kept secret. But you get the impression that no one in the administration is losing much sleep over it.

Two days before the murders in Newtown, Obama’s press secretary was asked about women and children being killed by drones in Yemen and Pakistan. He refused to answer, on the grounds that such matters are “classified”. Instead, he directed the journalist to a speech by John Brennan, Obama’s counter-terrorism assistant. Brennan insists that “al-Qaida’s killing of innocents, mostly Muslim men, women and children, has badly tarnished its appeal and image in the eyes of Muslims”.

He appears unable to see that the drone war has done the same for the US. To Brennan the people of north-west Pakistan are neither insects nor grass: his targets are a “cancerous tumour”, the rest of society “the tissue around it”. Beware of anyone who describes a human being as something other than a human being.

Yes, he conceded, there is occasionally a little “collateral damage”, but the US takes “extraordinary care [to] ensure precision and avoid the loss of innocent life”. It will act only if there’s “an actual ongoing threat” to American lives. This is cock and bull with bells on.

The “signature strike” doctrine developed under Obama, which has no discernible basis in law, merely looks for patterns. A pattern could consist of a party of unknown men carrying guns (which scarcely distinguishes them from the rest of the male population of north-west Pakistan), or a group of unknown people who look as if they might be plotting something. This is how wedding and funeral parties get wiped out; this is why 40 elders discussing royalties from a chromite mine were blown up in March last year. It is one of the reasons why children continue to be killed.

Obama has scarcely mentioned the drone programme and has said nothing about its killing of children. The only statement I can find is a brief and vague response during a video conference last January. The killings have been left to others to justify. In October the Democratic cheerleader Joe Klein claimed on MSNBC that “the bottom line in the end is whose four-year-old gets killed? What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror”. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, killing four-year-olds is what terrorists do. It doesn’t prevent retaliatory murders, it encourages them, as grief and revenge are often accomplices.

Most of the world’s media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown, either ignores Obama’s murders or accepts the official version that all those killed are “militants”. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.

“Are we,” Obama asked on Sunday, “prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” It’s a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the children of Pakistan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George Joshua Richard Monbiot (born 27 January 1963 in Kensington, London[1]) is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales,[2] writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (2008).

Twitter: @georgemonbiot