Suspicion

From the New York Times, August 8, 2013, “Since July 27, drone attacks have killed 34 suspected militants.” (emphasis mine)

Suppose I get pissed off at my neighbor for something and call the police, telling them that I overheard him planning to rob a bank and kill the bank guards. The police respond by coming in the middle of the night with guns and rockets and blowing up his house, killing him and his entire family. They don’t try to arrest him, call on him to surrender or even announce their presence; they just blow up his house and kill everyone in it.

That would be okay, right? He is, after all, suspected of being a bank robber and a killer based on my accusation. I would be wrong for making the false accusation, but the police would be correct in their response. Right?

You’re shaking your head and saying that I am utterly insane, and yet you feel okay with your country firing Hellfire missiles and killing “suspected militants;” men, women and children whose names we do not even know.

If you live in this country there is an elaborate process that must be followed to prove that you actually did something wrong before you can even be imprisoned, but if you live in a Muslim country we can kill you based merely on the suspicion that you might be thinking of planning to do something someday in the future that might be wrong. We can, in a word, kill you merely for not liking us; and we do.

We don’t even bother to hide it. We brag about it.

If you live in a Muslim country and you don’t like us, you better keep quiet about us, because if you advertise that you don’t like us there is a pretty good chance that a Hellfire missile will come down on you and blow you into little pieces. And when we announce that we killed you, we will not even say your name.

It’s hard to describe how angry I become every time I read that the nation whose uniform I once wore with pride is killing suspected militants; that we are killing people without even knowing that they are our enemies; that we are killing them because we can kill them without any risk; that we are killing them merely because it is easy and inexpensive to do so.

It makes me angry and it makes me want to weep.