Jun 25 2009

Bombing funerals is “overkill.”

President Pretty Mouth likes to stick his tongue in our collective ear about the universality of human dignity, freedom from coercive repression, and justice, but it feels utterly inappropriate.

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Why, just recently he said such things as these:

“I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.”

[I am] “appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the past few days.”

“While this loss [of innocent life] is raw and extraordinarily painful, we also know this: Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

Meanwhile, actual facts betray his words as a grim joke.  The remote-controlled killing of civilians in Af/Pak and the continuing saga of torture could not be more remorseless.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral for a Taliban fighter in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

Family members mourned Mr. Zainuddin, a tribal leader, on Tuesday in Abbotabad.

Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan.The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.

The Onion grimaces at the casual disregard for life:

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Bored Predator Drone Pumps A Few Rounds Into Mountain Goat

This administration needs to sell some more treasuries and buy a friggin’ clue.  The ill-advised Af/Pak war is sliding off the table for multiple reasons, including the savage predator drone attacks on civilians that occur mostly when innocents congregate at their most sacred, solemn, or joyous ceremonies, their funerals and weddings.

Obama’s words are meant to soothe, console, and enjoin us to a common humanity, but these hypocritically uttered profanities rather represent verbal abuse of the dead, rhetorical necrophilia.  Put your heartbroken tongue back in your mouth, Mr. President.

 

7 comments

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  1. I don’t even understand the mission to begin with.

    • Edger on June 25, 2009 at 01:15
    • #

    June 10, 2009

    In Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, the skies over Korea, in 1950, are described in this way:

       “The planes always come…like planets on rotation. A timed bloodletting, with different excuses.”

    The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came twenty days ago, on May 20th, 2009. A U.S. drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4:30 AM, killing 14 women and children and 2 elders, wounding eleven.

    The previous day, some travelers had come to Khaisor, and the villagers had served them a meal. “This is our custom,” my friend relates. “It is our traditional way.” But these travelers were members of the Taliban, and their visit was noted by U.S. forces. It is possible they were identified through pictures taken by unmanned U.S. drones. Although the visitors had left right after their meal, the U.S. responded to this act of hospitality by bombing the homes of the hosts early the following morning.

    I asked my friend how families cope, when a bomb suddenly blasts their home in the middle of the night. Do they have any kind of first aid available to help the wounded? “You see this,” he said, pointing to the long shawl that I happened to be wearing, a customary part of every village woman’s dress, “they try to use this [as a bandage] because it is all they have.” I imagined the shawl rapidly soaking up the blood of a dying Pakistani man, woman, or child.

    [snip]

    Villagers have become accustomed to the drone attacks. At first, some were paralyzed with fear -but since 2001, they’ve endured about 70 such attacks, and drone surveillance has become a routine fact of life. Even the children can identify the drones flying overhead. “When there is a drone up above the children don’t play in a group because they don’t want the drone to hit them,” said our visitor. The pilots of the drones, looking through monitors at their consoles in Nevada and elsewhere in the U.S., are more likely to mistake groups of people for their designated targets than people standing alone. Groups of children have been attacked. “The children scatter and run away, and they stop playing for some hours.”

    Asked if he saw any alternatives to the fighting, my friend immediately said that the attackers – the people from the United States – should come and sit with them. “If they come and discuss and throw away the arms, I hope it will be far better than if they are hitting us and trying to bring the peace through arms. Even if the peace comes, through arms, we will never forget after 100 years, and we will take revenge.”

    “Our area was the most peaceful,” he continued, “but when the army came to Afghanistan it also affected us and our area became more violent. They should come and sit with us, assess our need, they should help us get drinking water, they should give us education, they should give us loans, they should help us in agriculture.”

  3. to mechanicly destroy the others.  Not risking our own, we will see the cost of this careless destruction, paid by the innocent.  

    • Inky99 on June 25, 2009 at 04:41
    • #

    Oh wait …

    They didn’t?

    Maybe they attacked us since 9/11 …?

    No …?

    Well, they MUST be dangerous to us somehow, or we wouldn’t be killing them!  

    And those drones are just SO cool!

  5. Would that be worth it to you as long as “we are the right side of history”?  

    Fuck!

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