From: PressTV
COMMENT - One would think running 'Terror Tuesdays" would at least result in a demand the Nobel Peace Prize be returned, wouldn't you? Yet we can thank Obama for bringing Americans together across the political divide.
ARTICLE
Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian
Not long after he was elected president, Barack Obama arranged what senior U.S. officials called "Terror Tuesdays".
On the agenda
were "kill lists" - names of individuals whose perceived threat to America's
security made them targets for assassination by unmanned drone attacks in
Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The kill lists,
scrutinized personally by Obama at the weekly meetings, were soon expanded to
become what U.S. journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars, calls a form
of "pre-crime" justice where individuals are considered fair game if they met
certain life patterns of suspected terrorists.
Unidentified
individuals, described as "military aged-males", would be targeted if they were
at a certain place at certain times.
These are
considered legitimate targets in "signature strikes".
How Obama
embraced the hawks and the unaccountable and secretive Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) left behind by the Bush administration is powerfully documented
in Dirty Wars, published in Britain by Serpent's Tail this
week.
"One of the
enduring legacies of Obama's presidency is how he has normalized assassination
as a central component of what is called America's national security policy",
Scahill told me.
It has been
easier for a Nobel Peace prize winning liberal Democrat to get away with drone
strikes, prosecuting and persecuting whistleblowers, keeping Congress in the
dark, than a Republican hawk, Scahill suggests.
Congress has not
been able, or not wanted, to question the drone strikes, and polls show a
majority in support of them.
"They are seen
as a smarter, new way of cleaning up war", said Scarhill. That encouraged him to
call the book, Dirty Wars.
He added: "I
believe we are creating more new enemies than we are killing terrorists...And
revenge is as powerful force".
Republicans,
meanwhile, have chided Obama calling the drone strikes as an alternative to
transporting and interrogating terror suspects at Guantanamo
Bay.
Over the past
decade, the U.S. has ordered at least 300 drone strikes in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Mali, taking out some high level al-Qaeda targets,
but also killing some 2,000 civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism.
In his eight
years in office, Bush ordered about 50 drone strikes aimed at alleged
terrorists. Obama is believed to have ordered nearly 300 in his first term as
president.
The belated
stirrings of a debate in the U.S. will not be welcomed by the British government
which has already tried to distance itself from the opposition drone strikes
have provoked in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Britain's SAS
has taken part in U.S. special operations in what Scahill calls the CIA's
"black-site archipelago" and British officials are likely to be in the loop, and
even helping, U.S. security and intelligence agencies in drone strikes ordered
by Washington. Lawyers acting for the British government have already warned
that any UK involvement will remain secret.
Drones are here
to stay.
They are likely
to be used more and more against targets in north, east, and west Africa, and
elsewhere. Scahill subtitles his book, The World is a
Battlefield.
Dirty Wars also
chronicles in detail the life and death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American killed
by a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011 on the grounds that he was an
influential al-Qaeda supporter and operative.
His son,
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American boy, was killed in a drone strike
a month later.
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