Wednesday, February 08, 2012

The Drones Resume

This absolutely infuriates me. From Reuters yesterday,

A U.S. drone aircraft killed 10 suspected militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan region near the Afghanistan border on Wednesday, security officials and residents said, the fifth such strike this year.

In Wednesday's attack, a drone fired two missiles at a house suspected of being a militant hideout in the village of Thapi, 15 km (10 miles) east of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan.

Emphasis mine. We now kill people on suspicion, and we kill them by the houseful on suspicion. This is who we have become. Not only assassins, but assassins of a degree and willfulness that we don’t even care about certainty. This is what this president has turned my country into and moreover, fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse this policy.

And note that they are called “militants,” not terrorists. They are not suspected of plotting to attack the United States, but rather to attack our forces in Afghanistan, which is their country. They are Taliban, which has never killed a single American who was not attacking them in their own country. And we kill them in their houses, along with their wives and children, based on suspicion that they might be planning to resist our occupation.

And it goes unnoticed while we complain about how much money the rich have; while we parse political talks to find phrases we can take out of context and use to attack the speaker; while we wrangle over how much money our government spends without giving any thought to the purpose of that spending, merely arguing over the amount of it.

I once wore the uniform of the armed forces of this nation, having volunteered to put my life at risk to defend this nation and it's people.
I most certainly would not make that same choice today.

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