Stephen Lendman

Obama's wars increase body counts daily. New ones planned will add more. Death squads operate in 120 or more countries. So do CIA agents licensed to kill. US citizens may be targeted at home or abroad. No one anywhere is safe. Summary judgment means no arrests. No Miranda rights. No due process. No trial. Just a bullet, bomb or slit throat. It's official Obama policy. Diktat authority affords justice to no one ordered killed.

On May 29, The New York Times upped the stakes. Its article headlined "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will," saying:

Obama "placed himself at the helm of a top secret 'nominations' process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical."

In other words, he appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. Despot authority is official administration policy. Diktats decide who lives or dies.

Anyone called Al Qaeda or accused of terrorist connections gets marked for death.

What "moral and legal conundrum" could he face, asked The Times. - None whatever. On day one in office, he spurned rule of law principles.

He adopted George Bush's ideology. His predecessor called "the Constitution....just a G-damn piece of paper."

Obama feels the same. He's comfortable with "unitary executive" authority. It puts him above the law. Chalmers Johnson called it "a ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy....dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo."

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Philip Giraldi

I would like to see The Washington Post come up with a solid, fact-based case explaining why a war with Iran would produce a good result for the United States, because that is really the only argument justifying American involvement in such an enterprise.

Many Washington pundits understand that the conclusion of a tale very much depends on where one starts. The starting point is how the argument is framed, and if the reader accepts the initial premises, then the rest of the case being made falls into place. Many of the all-too-familiar voices in the foreign policy community are appalled by the prospect that talks with Iran might actually succeed and prevent a possible major war in the Middle East. Since such a war would certainly expand regionally and might well go nuclear, one would expect that its avoidance would be welcomed by all, but that is not necessarily so, particularly if one makes a good living promoting the view that Iran is an existential threat that must be dealt with sooner or later.

Last Wednesday’s Washington Post included an op-ed by two regularly featured advocates of the get-tough-with-Iran school of thought. They are Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz, both of whom are on the payroll of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For those who are unfamiliar with FDD, it is a neocon-dominated organization that nevertheless claims to be nonpartisan. It focuses on foreign policy and security issues by “fighting terrorism and promoting freedom,” as it informs us on its website masthead. It works to “defend free nations against their enemies,” which frequently means in practice anyone whom Israel considers to be hostile. FDD’s Leadership Council features former CIA Director James Woolsey, Sen. Joe Lieberman, and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

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William T. Hathaway

"The Spirit Of '76" Archibald M. Willard (1836-1918)

Once again in election season the drums of patriotism are being beaten. Politicians on the stump and their Madison Avenue flacks are exhorting us to rally around the tattered flag. Their drumming sounds feeble and hollow, though, like cheerleaders trying to rouse the fans while our military team goes down to defeat, bringing the economy with it.

The drummers persist because their patriotic noise drowns out the voices of those asking disturbing questions: Why are we playing this losing game to begin with? Why are we bankrupting the country with endless war? How can we love a nation that slaughters millions of our fellow human beings? These questions endanger the game, and the game must go on.

Patriotism keeps us in the game. It's an instrument of control that's cultivated in us as children through emotional rituals designed to make us identify our nation with our family and with some higher power. These rituals create a bond of feeling linking God the Father, the Founding Fathers, and our own fathers into a patriarchal hierarchy that rewards us if we're obedient and punishes us if we're rebellious. It's a tool for keeping us in our place.

Patriotism exploits the love we have for our parents by projecting it onto the nation. We love our country, so we react to criticism of it as an attack on our family. This criticism hurts our feelings on a deep personal level, so we reject it. It's too threatening to us. The emotionality of patriotism keeps us from thinking about what the USA is actually doing in the world: dominating other countries through economic, political, and military aggression.

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Medea Benjamin

The dead victim of a CIA Predator Drone in Western Pakistan

“When women and children in Waziristan are killed with Hellfire missiles, Pakistanis believe this is what the American people want. I would like to ask Americans, ‘Do you?’”

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinary in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?

Why should the public believe what the Obama administration says about the people being assassinated by drones? Especially since, as we learn in the New York Times, the administration came up with a semantic solution to keep the civilian death toll to a minimum: simply count all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants. The rationale, reminiscent of George Zimmerman’s justification for shooting Trayvon Martin, is that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” Talk about profiling! At least when George Bush threw suspected militants into Guantánamo their lives were spared.

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