Kill List Tuesday & The Inaugural Address

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Dear Mr. President,

All the pomp and ceremony over, it’s back to business as usual and today being Kill List Tuesday, business as usual is selecting those who will die this week by drone strike or Special Forces assassins. Do you regard Kill List Tuesday as a presidential perk, deciding who will live and who will die? A vent to frustration? Revenge for past wrongs? Or even more horrifying, do you believe this is the right thing to do? Yesterday, during the pomp and ceremony, the killing took no pause. A small article in the NYT reported that a drone strike in Yemen on Monday killed 3 suspected members of Al Qaeda. The same article reported that Saturday, two drone strikes in that country killed 8. No additional information was provided, but by now we the people know that drone strikes in Yemen are run by the CIA, you authorize each one and they are all illegal, immoral, against the UN Charter, against international law, against the Constitution, and against human decency. No evidence, no court of law, no trial by jury, no legal recourse, each murder a war crime and a crime against humanity. Your inaugural address included these words: “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” but bureaucratizing and institutionalizing targeted assassinations makes them accepted policy and self-perpetuating. You honored “our brave men and women in uniform tempered by the flames of battle” but where is the bravery in sitting at a computer far from any battlefield and launching death and destruction on a helpless victim from an unseen drone? You also said, “A decade of war is now ending,” but that too, is false. Your drone wars will continue and the war in Afghanistan will not really end in 2014, merely evolve, for as many as 20,000 American troops will remain indefinitely and tens of billions of dollars will be spent to prop up the corrupt Karzai regime, an affront to Afghans and Americans alike. No matter the words or proclamations or resolutions or inaugural addresses, our wars of terror will not end as long as we as a nation are addicted to violence and as long as war remains accepted policy; war will simply shift and morph and evolve into other forms of destructive brutality and other forms of injustice and violence. How can anyone believe your words of peace, Mr. President, while your drones rain Hellfire on the deserts of Yemen and the mountains of Waziristan in a campaign of terror unmatched in human history?