How many people did Osama Bin Laden kill? As far as we know, none. He was sitting in a cave somewhere. The actual murderers, at least on the planes, all died. Bin Laden was COMPLICIT in the murders, as was Ayman al Zawahiri (whose location we knew in the Bush era, as well as Bin Ladens), but he didn’t actually kill anyone we know of directly.
The people we call “terrorists” are not in most cases actual murderers. They are aspiring murderers.
Yet, what has happened is that post-9/11 (which as I have shown clearly included as-yet-unidentified coconspirators) is that we have created this legally unique category “terrorist”. And to pursue this legally unique category of person we have perverted our laws in all sorts of ways.
Obama would never have said he had the right to kill, say, a serial killer in a drone strike. He would never have said he could kill a gangster in a drone strike; or a serial rapist, or bank robber, or wife beater, or pedophile.
But we have been CONDITIONED to view terrorists, and the threat of terrorism, as unique. OF COURSE, nuclear terrorism, and biological and chemical terrorism are different than ordinary crimes.
But as Rand Paul has pointed out clearly, the question is not if we can act in the face of impending attack. The question is if the President can kill someone upon whom the label “terrorist” has been hung, when no threat is imminent.
Consider the drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Generally, we use them simply as ways of assassinating leaders who are otherwise rarely seen. It is not different in principle than the use of a sniper to take out an enemy commander in warfare.
What Obama has tacitly done, through what he has not said, is that he thinks that if he can plausibly call someone a terrorist, that person becomes a special sort of criminal, such that even if he or she is an American citizen, the laws of the United States do not apply to them.
Put another way, Obama is using the abuse of language that the “War on Terror” has facilitated to create room to take concrete steps to become a dictator with the power of life and death.
To be clear, a terrorist is not different IN ANY WAY–ANY WAY–from any other sort of criminal. They are not different than the kid who shot up Sandy Hook Elementary, or Jeffrey Dahmer. Yes, their desired body count may be higher, but this is not a difference in principle.
Particularly once you consider that SOMEBODY got away with their participation in 9/11 fully undetected, one has to see the logic of “terrorism” as logic intended to facilitate large land grabs.
In that spirit, I will resurrect an old ghost, the “Report from Iron Mountain “
The heavily footnoted report concluded that peace was not in the
interest of a stable society, that even if lasting peace “could be
achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of
society to achieve it.” War was a part of the economy. Therefore, it was
necessary to conceive a state of war for a stable economy. The
government, the group theorized, would not exist without war, and nation
states existed in order to wage war. War also served a vital function
of diverting collective aggression. They recommended that bodies be
created to emulate the economic functions of war. They also recommended
“blood games” and that the government create alternative foes that would
scare the people with reports of alien life-forms and out-of-control
pollution. Another proposal was the reinstitution of slavery.
Now, nobody wanted to claim this. No surprise. Someone who apparently was involved in the writing claimed it was satire. My questions are these: 1) is it funny? The answer would appear to be no.; 2) if Lewin was the author, why did he take five years to claim authorship when the book was a bestseller?
The claims of John Kenneth Galbraith are plausible, and if you pay attention, you will note the ideas with regard to government are not that different than those in Orwell’s 1984.
Consider in this spirit the “War on Terror”. I supported it. I supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I supported spooks helping out in Thailand,and the Phillipines, and Indonesia, and Malaysia and elsewhere.
But where are we? We are at declaring American citizens can be killed and detained without trial or even a writ of habeas corpus. We have had NO attacks of consequence on American soil in 11 years, and yet have spent TRILLIONS of dollars.
I’m done. We need to downsize both the welfare state and the military, and live within our means. We need further to generate bipartisan UNDERSTANDING of the fundamentally and horrifically inequitable role the Federal Reserve plays in siphoning the productive energies of Americans to the merely parasitic, both directlyh, and more importantly by propping up the foundationally unjust fractional reserve banking system.
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