Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com continues his lonely vigil of documenting the carnage
being inflicted upon civilians in Pakistan by the increasingly frenzied
drone missile attacks ordered by the Peace Laureate in the White House.
Almost every day, Ditz has fresh hell to offer up on the story of
this remarkably brazen campaign of outright war crimes. Most of his
pieces draw on foreign sources; there is almost nothing in the American
press about this literally inhuman invasion of the sovereign territory
of a nation allied to the United States. It is truly a bizarre
situation; then again, in a militarist system whose pervasive moral
depravity has long reached lunatic proportions, murdering the children
of your allies is perhaps not so unusual. Certainly, the guardians of
our public discourse don't consider it newsworthy in any way.
The latest update from Ditz captures many of the main features of
Barack Obama's ruthless robot war on Pakistan: mass killings, murky
motives and missed targets:
Pakistan's remote tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan are in a state of virtual panic tonight as US drones continue to loom in the air and three attacks against separate towns across the region killed at least 28 people and wounded an unknown number of others.
The Daily Times story that Ditz links to goes on to describe the "great
panic among the locals" as the American drones continued to hover over
the defenseless towns even after the attack. No one could be sure when
or if the robots would fire again. There was no way to stop the
machines; they were impervious, implacable, just floating there,
groaning in the sky, their "pilots" sitting safely and comfortably
before computer screens thousands of miles away. You couldn't get away,
you couldn't hide, you couldn't protect your children.
Ditz's story also includes what has become a familiar motif in the
American way of Terror War: attacking communal gathering of civilians
weddings, funerals and slaughtering the participants.
Officials have so far failed to identify any of the targets of the attacks, but reports from the ground suggest that one of the US drones attacked a funeral procession that was carried out for people killed in a previous attack.
Nor was this the only Standard Operating Procedure at play in the latest
raid. There was also the familiar "provocative attacks which destroy
local peace-making efforts and ensure the continuation of violent
conflict" scenario, coupled with one of the overarching themes of the
entire Terror War: missing the ostensible targets of a raid and killing civilians instead.
Reports suggested that the targets hit were related to one of the militant factions which has an existing ceasefire with the Pakistani government, and it does not appear that any of the victims of the attacks were "high value" targets.
This is in so many ways a portrait in miniature of the entire bloody and
misbegotten enterprise in Central Asia. For viewed in this light that
is, by the declared aims of the American-led coalition of
occupation -- what is the entire "Af-Pak" war but a gargantuan failure
to capture or kill a handful of "high value" targets, who somehow,
miraculously, always manage to escape, while civilians are killed by the
thousands?
But of course these "high value targets" are not the true aim of the war. The war itself is the aim of the war:
the continuation of perpetual and profitable conflict, and the
expansion of the power and privilege and corrupted wealth that accrues
to the bipartisan operators (and lickspittle apologists) of a militarist
empire.
Even the perpetrators of these war crimes no longer to pretend that
these conflicts have any real purpose; the War Machine's own
"intelligence analysts" regularly report that the wars are exacerbating
the very problems they are ostensibly designed to quell: violent
extremism, divisive tribalism, ignorance and poverty, repression of
women, political instability in strategic regions, fear and insecurity
at home, etc. But none of this matters not to the Peace Laureate and
his party of spineless corporate servitors, nor to the Republicans and
their cretinous Tea Partiers, nor, it seems, to the vast majority of the
American public who follow these blood-soaked factions of ruthless,
third-rate gangsters, bagmen, morons and courtiers.
And now another election season is upon us. The massive acts of
state terrorism committed by the United States will fall even further
beneath the media radar (if that's possible). "Progressive" forces will
furiously debate the best way to rouse the "base" to support their
admittedly disappointing champion, if only to keep the drooling hordes
of zealous Know-Nothings at bay. They will put aside the daily murder of
innocent people by their champion in order to play a few "savvy" hands
of partisan politics as if they were living in some kind of ordinary,
open political system, instead of a phantasmagorical Grand Guignol of
state terror, state murder and corporate rapine, a rigged game where the
only outcome is more and more and more of the same.
As for me, I am long past caring about the political fortunes of
murderers and cowards and of those who want to take their places and
be murderers and cowards too. I can only repeat for the nth time the words of Henry David Thoreau:
