by Scott Creighton
UPDATE: There are some good articles on this topic. Check out Firedoglake, Black Agenda Report, and Glenn Greenwald
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Jeremy Scahill went on MSNBC yesterday morning and said something that I have been writing for years, that by his own admission, Barack Obama is guilty of the murder of scores of innocent people in Yemen, including but not limited to 14 women and 21 children according to the Amnesty International report on the Dec. 17th 2009 cruise missile attack authorized by the Peace Prize “winning” president himself.
“Terrorist”?
Though I give him credit for that aspect of his appearance on the show, I have to remind everyone of the kinds of people who are designated “terrorists” in the first place and the real reason the Obama administration is bombing Yemen (it ain’t to protect our “freedoms” if that’s what you think) and Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia.
“This is a memo that describes how we are going to take out 7 countries in 5 years starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran.” Gen. W. Clark 2007
“If you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded clusterbombs and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do–the women and children that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen–those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area. There’s only one person that’s been identified that had any connection to Al Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S. tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It’s murder–it’s mass murder–when you say, ‘We are going to bomb this area’ because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are there. I’m sorry, that’s murder.” Jeremy Scahill
He was correct in coming to that conclusion, but unfortunately he still misses the point; even if they did kill one SUSPECTED terrorist (and “suspected” is the operative word there) in the lot during the Dec. 17th 2009 cruise missile strikes (which they didn’t by the way, Qaaim al-Raymi wasn’t there) the designation of that individual as a so-called “terrorist” in a nation we are not at war with is completely arbitrary and disingenuous.
“A military strike of this kind against alleged militants without an attempt to detain them is at the very least unlawful,” said Philip Luther, deputy director of AI’s Middle East and North Africa Programme. Raw story
A White House official said that Barack Obama called the 30 year dictator of Yemen right after the strike and congratulated him on the attack which, according to the same official, was carried out in order to protect a “U.S. asset” meaning a LNG pipeline owned by Ray Hunt or similar IMF/World Bank business related ventures in Yemen.
One of the targeted sites was a suspected al Qaeda training camp north of the capitol, Sanaa, and the second target was a location where officials said “an imminent attack against a U.S. asset was being planned.“…
… President Obama placed a call after the strikes to “congratulate” the President of Yemen, Ali Abdallah Salih, on his efforts against al Qaeda, according to White House officials. ABC News Dec. 18th 2009
The one aspect that is missing from the numerous discussion about “Obama the Decider” and his kill list meetings is evidence. We are morally outraged that the Obama administration claims everyone sitting around a designated “terrorist” is a terrorist themselves but we fail to remember the original terrorist is just a terrorist because Obama’s neoliberal warmongers say he is.
Take the case of Anwar Al-Aulaqi. While he was still breathing his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, found out he was on Obama’s so-called “kill list” (keep in mind that dictators all across the world which we have supported have always formulated “kill lists”, sometimes with the help of our own CIA, of people who resisted their brutal regimes) so he went to court in order to try to have him removed from the list. In fact, a governor in Yemen came forward and stated that there had been no evidence at all that Anwar was affiliated with al Qaeda but instead he was simply supportive of the people of Yemen who wished to overthrow their brutal dictator.
The Obama administration filed a motion to suppress the father’s lawsuit on the grounds that presenting evidence about Anwar’s guilt would violate the “state secrets” of a “political question”. The judge ruled with the Obama administration, and thus, they can kill U.S. citizens after having them declared a “terrorist” simply because they want to and no one has the authority to question their decision or even see the evidence on which it was based.
But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate its legality. Glenn Greenwald
Six days after killing Anwar and another U.S. citizen who was with him, the Obama administration killed Anwar’s son as well while he prepared a meal with several other young people. He was 17 years old at the time, he was designated the “terrorist” and thus the other children who died that day around him were also “terrorists” according to the Obama administration.
“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.” Washington Post
So as Jeremy and others question how the Obama administration keeps track of the body count, that’s fine. But let’s keep in mind just who exactly these “terrorists” really are and how they got on that secretive list in the first place. Because according to our laws and international laws, the extrajudicial killing of even those guys is still murder. And that’s to say nothing of the people who just happen to be sitting around them at the time.
Still, Jeremy needs to be given credit for getting some of the story right.
Filed under: Obama™, Protests in Yemen, Scott Creighton, War on Yemen, Yemen, Yemen Protests
Reblogged this on Piazza della Carina.
I heard Scahill in an interview with NPR a few weeks ago and he said essentially the same things. As you say, he deserves credit but he never takes it far enough and that’s why he gets the MSM time.
One interesting thing he talked about was that while he was in Yemen he got most of his best information, insights and interview opportunities during the khat eating sessions he attended on many afternoons. The Yemeni tradition of khat is an unusual story to say the least.
We should try to remember that the New York Times article wasn’t some bit of deep investigative journalism, but rather it was spoon fed to the reporters by dozens of Obama administration insiders some of who are actually sitting in on those Tuesday meetings deciding who gets whacked from above.
Obviously it serves their interests to put this story out there, that Obama is the “decider” in this highly illegal and immoral process. What that reason could be is hard to say.
I think it has to do with normalizing these kinds of actions… making it ok for presidents to have kill lists and to use cowardly drones strikes essentially as death squads from above. That’s why I focused on the aspect of this that I did. In a sense, Scahill is doing exactly what the administration wants, focusing on the body counts and not the process by which they declare someone to be a “terrorist”
I’ve had my issues with Scahill in the past, much for the same type of thing. Like you said, he never takes it far enough, never connects the dots.
I am one who certainly believes in taking things far enough! I am so sick of seeing this endless parade of horrors passing by us. Can’t we just say no to drones? It’s just NOT America if there are drones over our heads. Let’s ask the sheriffs to shoot them down!
I am blues and I do things the blues way. No more effete play-dead fake modesty for me! I don’t sit around and just gripe! I don’t protest in crowds (although there’s certainly nothing wrong with that) but rather think it would be really cool to have a single protestor on 10,000 street corners. So I do that. Most of all, I sit around and simply think up new ways to screw up the Empire. Then I post my schemes on the internet and get conspicuously ignored, or occasionally scolded for failure to hew to effete play-dead fake modesty! Here are some of my schemes, as the relate to Scott’s observations on the tyranny of Obama, et al.
First of all, let’s remember that the Bilderberg leet infestival is happening right this minute 24 miles due west of Washington, D.C. Notice that I do not call them “elites.” That appellation is much too sweet-sounding, much too genteel. The bums are damn LEETS! So let’s start calling them that. They are the only minority group that our faux “republic” was ever designed to protect!
Article 1, Section 8 of the piece of paper called the U.S. Constitution (The Constitution of the Heart, NOT the Constitution of the Letter, is the only real Constitution) states:
“The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States…”
How’s your general welfare these days? It would be a lot better if we simply confiscated the wealth of the insanely greedy, mentally deranged super-rich leets that are destroying everything. Some will say that the Supreme Court would never let it happen, but that is nonsense. Every single decision of law that the great judges make should require the consent of 3/4ths of a randomly selected jury of 100 American citizens. The lawyers will tell you that juries are only qualified to judge facts, but not issues of the law, but that is simply wrong. Just the fact that the lawyers have been saying that for centuries doesn’t make it correct.
The super-rich leets and their 1% cronies contribute NOTHING to our so-called “economy”! They have sold out 90% of our productional assets down the river to China, India, Japan, etc. All for pure Profit! They care about us about as much a they care about the Iraqi children they burned to death with white phosphorus!
No one should be allowed to own more that 20 times what they need to make a living and live comfortably. People should be required to register their substantial holdings, and if they exceed the 20 times limit, a random jury should force them to sell off the excess, and reduce their holdings to 15 times what they need. The proceeds should go to the commonwealth. Anything they fail to register should be confiscated, and those who willfully avoid registering assets should be punished. That is the only way to control economic royalism and protect freedom and human rights. Otherwise the 99% will inexorably be reduced to slavery.
Our fake “democracy” is worse than a joke! We have machines to cast and count our votes? Voting machines are 10,000+ times easier for the manipulative leets to hijack in coordinated scams. Obviously voting should be done only with pen and paper ballots. Every community of 5,000 citizens should have its polling and counting stations run by a randomly chosen jury, certainly not by some politician.
You should be allowed to vote for as many candidates as you wish (within reason — not the whole phone book). You could give any candidate no votes at all, or 10, or 11, or 12 votes (this is “padded score” voting; the 1 to 9 vote options are padded out to simplify voting and counting). This would reduce the two-party enforcing spoiler effect to almost nothing! And it’s totally simple! The votes are just added up before witnesses at the poling stations on the night of each election, with the results announced before being sent to larger counting stations.
By the way, it at least appears that the U.S. Green Party has finally dropped its endorsement of “IRV” voting. In any election robust enough to (seemingly) weaken the spoiler effect, IRV votes cannot realistically be counted without vote counting machines. And yet, this method does nothing to actually weaken the spoiler effect, it only hides it. States that use it always end up with two-party systems. This method has been very aggressively promoted by an organization that was very heavily funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the
Ford Foundation, etc. I used to have links to prove this, but they’ve since been taken down. The organization that promotes this simply lies to deny the facts that I just stated. Large organizations do tend to lie often!
So there you have some of my “demands.” No fake modesty for me! Perhaps you may even spot me promoting them on some street corner.
(I probably will be forced to vote for Obama, since Romney is 20% worse. This tragic reality is why the padded score voting method is so important to me.)
Reblogged this on NonviolentConflict.