For Obama, if you’re male and near a terrorist, that makes you guilty. So die.

From a New York Times article about the US’s killer drone program:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

And although the first anonymous official quoted gives the impression that we’re only killing truckloads of armed men headed towards imminent hostilities, we’re also targeting rescuers and mourners.

It’s disgusting behavior. It’s murderous, callous, sexist, and simply wrong. And it’s dubious whether it actually reduces terrorism at all; it’s possible acts like this make Americans less safe.

I’m still planning to vote for Obama, but I may have to put a bag over my head and shower afterwards.

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10 Responses to For Obama, if you’re male and near a terrorist, that makes you guilty. So die.

  1. 1
    RonF says:

    I’m still planning to vote for Obama, but I may have to put a bag over my head and shower afterwards.

    I have very rarely voted for a candidate in a general election. I have done so in primary elections, but in general elections I much more often than not have voted against a candidate.

  2. 2
    RonF says:

    And if this was President [ not_a_Democrat] this would be pounded on the front page of the NYT every day.

    I’m sorry – I know your main point is that the action itself is reprehensible and that’s fair, even true. But the double standard can’t just be ignored.

  3. 3
    Ampersand says:

    Ron, the double standard is in your imagination.

    During each of the last three Republican presidents, I was constantly frustrated that the mainstream press didn’t give a crap about innocent people killed by the US Army. The same thing happened during Clinton, and is happening now during Obama. There has NEVER been a point in my lifetime when the US Army killing innocent bystanders has gotten the sort of daily front page coverage that considerably less important issues frequently get.

    (The Times, if anything, is to be commended for doing some actual reporting in this instance – reporting that right-wing outlets haven’t done. Although the story as a whole has many anonymous quotes from Obama officials praising how smart and fair Obama has been.)

    The US media — very much including right-wing media like Fox — has a strong bias against criticizing what the US Army does abroad, like killing innocent bystanders. That’s the real bias.

  4. 4
    Korolev says:

    Unfortunately, this is war. Innocent people die in wars – that has ALWAYS been the case, that always WILL be the case. Even with “targeted” missiles and “smart” bombs, the explosions that these devices generated are not targeted. The minute you use explosives, you’re going to kill civilians. Hell, the minute you go to war, you’re going to kill civilians. Every army on Earth has killed civilians – every militant group, every fighter who uses violence – they’ve all killed the innocent because you cannot divorce fighting from the rest of society. The US army and the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda fighters aren’t going to designate a 5 mile by 5 mile “kill box” and say “let’s do all our fighting in that zone, alright guys?”

    Should there be a war in Afghanistan? That’s an entirely different question – one which I think increasingly the answer should be no, because I don’t think the US or NATO can actually do any permanent good in that nation. We can’t change Afghanistan – the Afghans have to do that themselves.

    But I will raise one point – I’ve seen images and videos on Nat Geo of Taliban fighters (and I’m pretty sure Al-Qaeda do the same) taking shelter in buildings with children and women and in many cases, sending these women and children to walk about on the rooftops to act as human shields. Many of the civilian casualties are a direct result of the tactics used by the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda fighters. Hell, this entire war was started when some unpleasant folks flew a couple of planes into two buildings all those years ago, and the Taliban led government of Afghanistan sheltered those unpleasant folks.

    You’re too hard on yourself and your own country. The US makes a ton of mistakes and does some callous evil stuff (then again, so does every country. Show me a country that doesn’t have a ton of skeletons in its closet. Show me one.) but don’t pretend that you are the only nation that has to live up to standards or show morality or that you are the only nation with a duty to act humanely. You’re not. Those taliban folks and Al-Qaeda people – they have moral responsibilities too! And they are responsible for, in my opinion, more pain that is being inflicted upon Iraq and Afghanistan than the US military. Why do they keep fighting? Why do they use human shields? Are they justified in bombing civilian markets with truck bombs? Realize that there wouldn’t be so many civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan if these awful terrorists (most of whom don’t even come from Iraq or Afghanistan) just stopped fighting.

    The US deserves some blame for civilian casualties – that much is for sure. They use weapons with ridiculous explosive yields and they are far too quick to disown any civilian deaths caused by reckless behavior.

    But the US army is not the only “bad” guy in Afghanistan. They don’t deserve ALL the blame for the mess that is occurring in that nation.

  5. 5
    Korolev says:

    The only way you’re not going to kill civilian bystanders is if you never go to war. Now, if we could never go to war, ever again, that would be swell. Wonderful. War is terrible. I’ve never fought in one, never want to, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that War is really a terrible thing, and the vast vast vast majority of soldiers don’t want to get involved with wars and get sent away from their homes and families for years at a time.

    Maybe the US should leave Afghanistan. I’m starting to think they should. “Fixing” Afghanistan is not something foreigners can do. Not only that, but thanks to the wonderful state the Soviets and now Americans and foreign insurgents have left that country in over the past 30 years, “Fixing” or repairing Afghanistan would take decades and decades and literally hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars. I don’t think the US can stabilize or fix Afghanistan, and that the longer the US remains in Afghanistan, the longer it will take for Afghanistan to begin on the pathway to recovery.

    But again – it’s not just the US that should leave. Pakistan has been meddling in that nation for years upon years. China, drawn by recent discovery of mineral wealth, is right now, hiring PMCs and Security firms to try to “settle” down areas of Afghanistan for Chinese mining companies to enter, and believe me they will soon (and PMCs are not nearly as nice as the US army). Afghanistan should be left alone…. not that it would do much good if we did…. but they deserve to be left alone if that’s what they want. Unfortunately, the world is not about what people “Deserve”. It’s about what will happen.

    And if the US leave Afghanistan, nothing will get better. The Karzai government will crumble (as it deserves to since it stole the last election) and the Taliban will come roaring back. The few schools built for girls? Gone. The few female MPs? Probably executed if they don’t get the hell out of that country. The scant progress that was made under the US administration? Gone entirely. The Taliban weren’t known for their infrastructure building skills.

    You can’t blame the US for everything that’s wrong anywhere. Afghanistan was a mess that persecuted its women even before the USSR and the USA ever got involved. The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Pakistan and in the future, China I am sure, are/or will be/ responsible for a lot of the pain that is being felt in Afghanistan. You Americans always think that somehow you’re the centre of it all, that you’re actions are the only actions that matter. Whether or not you stay or leave, Afghanistan is going to be a mess for a long, long, long, loooooong time.

    So you might as well leave and save your economy some of the pain. The rest of us would be grateful – we need you Americans to pick up some economic steam right now.

  6. 6
    AMM says:

    The real lie in what the Administration is doing isn’t the undercounting of “civilian bystanders.” It’s the pretense that there are two distict groups — “enemy combatants” and “civilian bystanders.” There’s only one group: the Afghan population, a bunch of people with varying degrees of opposition to the USA’s presence and varying willingness to do something about it. (Not to mention widely varying ideas about how the country should be run.)

    The USA is waging a war of conquest in Afghanistan, and as such, the entire population is our target. The term “counterterrorism” is a fancy name for what occupying armies have always done with a resistant population: kill anyone who seems to be opposing you, and convince the rest that resistance will only get them and people they care about killed to no purpose. (Sounds like Capitol in Hunger Games, doesn’t it?) As such, “civilian casualties” and atrocities are not just inevitable, but essential.

    The reason for the lie, of course, is to allow the US population to deceive themselves about what the US is actually doing in Afghanistan. (Just as they did in Iraq, in Vietnam, and other places that don’t come to mind right off.)

    What nobody seems to have thought about very much is what the USA would do if we ever did succeed in suppressing all opposition to our presence there. Just as nobody in the Bush administration thought about what they would do once the Iraqi army was defeated and destroyed.

  7. 7
    nobody.really says:

    What happened to celebrating efficiency in government services? Obama is just trying to kill two birds with one drone.

  8. 8
    Ampersand says:

    Many of the strikes under discussion are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Discussing this as if it were an Afghanistan-only issue therefore doesn’t make much sense.

  9. 9
    engh says:

    In the absence of having the energy to deal with the typical American “unfortunately people die in war” filth, here’s something useful on the liberal outrage point: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/06/02/how-coverage-of-obamas-role-in-drone-executions-provokes-liberal-outrage/

  10. 10
    AMM says:

    Many of the strikes under discussion are in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Discussing this as if it were an Afghanistan-only issue therefore doesn’t make much sense.

    Who’s saying that it is an “Afghanistan-only” issue (i.e., confined to the area inside the borders of Afghanistan)?

    The attacks on Pakistani territory are part of the War in/on Afghanistan, just as the USA invasions of Cambodia and Laos were part of the Vietnam War. Call it mission creep, if you like.

    For that matter, the trial of Bradley Manning is part of the Afghan War, even though it is not taking place in Afghanistan (and I don’t even know if the leaks took place there.)