Two Stories in the Same Day
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That the U.S. Is Rotten to the Core By Ted Rall April 25, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - Still think the United States is governed by decent people? That the system isn't totally corrupt and obscenely unfair?
Two stories that broke
April 23 ought to wake you up.
Story 1: President Obama admitted that one of his
Predator drones killed two aid workers, an American and an Italian, who
were being held hostage by al-Qaida in Pakistan. As The Guardian reports,
"The lack of specificity [about the targets] suggests that despite a
much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings
by, among other things, requiring 'near certainty that the terrorist target
is present,' the U.S. continues to launch lethal operations without the
necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has
come to be known as a 'signature strike.'"
"Lack of
specificity" is putting it mildly. According to a report by the group
Reprieve, the U.S. targeted 41 "terrorists" — actually, enemies
of the corrupt Yemeni and Pakistani regimes — with drones during 2014.
Thanks to "lack of specificity," a total of 1,150 people were
killed. Which doesn't even include the 41 targets, many of whom got away
clean.
Obama's hammy pretend grief
was Shatner-worthy. Biting his lip in that sorry/not sorry Bill Clinton
way, the president summed up mock sadness for an event that happened back
in January. Come on, dude. You seriously expect us to believe you've been
all weepy for the last three months — excluding all those speeches and
other public appearances in which you were laughing and cracking jokes?
And the same exact day when
he pretend-sadded, he also yukked it up with the Super Bowl champion New
England Patriots. "That whole story got blown a little out of
proportion," he jibed. (re: "deflate-gate.") While sad. But
laughing.
So confusing.
I swear, the right-wing
racists are right to hate him. But they hate him for totally the wrong
reasons.
Anyway, what took so long
for the White House to admit they killed one of our best citizens? "It
took weeks to correlate [the hostages'] reported deaths with the drone
strikes," The New York Times quoted White House officials. But in his
prepared remarks, Obama said "capturing these terrorists was not
possible" — thus the drone strike.
How stupid does the
administration think we are?
The fact that it is
possible to find out who dies in a drone fact (albeit after the fact)
indicates that there is reliable intelligence coming out of the targeted
areas, presumably provided by local police and military sources. If there
are cops and troops there who are friendly enough to give us information,
then it obviously is possible to ask them to capture the targeted
individuals.
Bottom line: The U.S.
government is blowing up people with drones willy-nilly, without the
slightest clue who they're blowing up. Which, as political assassinations,
are illegal. And which they specifically said was what they were no longer
doing. Then they have the nerve to pretend to be sad about the completely
avoidable consequences of their actions. They're disgusting and gross and
ought to be locked in prison forever.
Story 2: David Petraeus,
former hotshot media-darling general of the Bush and early Obama years,
received a slap on the wrist — probation plus a $100,000 fine — for
improperly passing on classified military documents to unauthorized people
and lying about it to federal agents when they questioned him about it.
Here we go again: more
proof that, in the American justice system some people fly first-class
while the rest of us go coach.
In this backwards world,
people like Petraeus, who ought to be held to the highest standard because
they were entrusted with immense power and responsibility, walk free while
low-ranking schlubs who committed the same crime get treated like Al
Capone. Private Chelsea Manning, who released war logs documenting U.S. war
crimes in Iraq to WikiLeaks, rots in prison for 35 years. Edward Snowden,
the 31-year-old systems administrator for a private NSA outsourcing firm
who revealed that the U.S. government is reading all our emails and
listening to all our phone calls,
faces life in prison.
Two years probation.
Meanwhile, teachers who helped their students cheat on standardized tests
got seven years in prison. To Petraeus, who went to work for a hedge fund,
$100,000 is a nice tip for the caddy.
Adding insanity to insult
is the fact that Petraeus' motive for endangering national security was
venal: he gave the documents to his girlfriend, who wrote his authorized
biography. Manning and Snowden, heroes who in a sane society would receive
ticker-tape parades and about atrocities committed in their name, and about
wholesale violations of their basic
presidential medals of freedom, weren't after glory. They wanted to
inform the American people freedoms, including the right to privacy.
Before he was caught and
while he was sharing classified info with his gf, Petraeus had the gall to
hypocritically pontificate about a CIA officer who disclosed sensitive
information. Unlike Petraeus, the CIA guy got coach-class justice: 30
months in prison.
"Oaths do
matter," Petraeus pompously bloviated in 2012, "and there are
indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that
protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to
operate with the requisite degree of secrecy."
If you're a first-classer,
the consequences are very small.
Ted Rall, syndicated writer
and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new
critically-acclaimed book "After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back
As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan." Subscribe to Ted Rall
at Beacon.
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Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Two Stories in the Same Day Show That the U.S. Is Rotten to the Core
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