Moving Up The Ladder: Rewarded for War Crimes

Dear Mr. President,
According to this morning’s NYT, the female undercover CIA agent behind the order to destroy those torture tapes is moving up the ladder, poised to be appointed head of the CIA’s clandestine service, “one of the most coveted jobs in the CIA.” (I love that euphemism, “clandestine service,” like it’s some banal, mundane service agency instead of a killing and torture machine). This female agent “spent years working inside the agency’s Counterterrorism Center and once was in charge of a so-called black site, played a role in developing the CIA’s detention and intervention program…” [the rendition program]. And who will make the decision whether her temporary appointment becomes permanent? None other than Mr. Death-by-Drone himself, John O. Brennan, the guy responsible for Kill Lists who sits at your right hand every Tuesday nodding approval or disapproval of your choices for who dies this week, the architect of drone wars, the guy who institutionalized perpetual war, who claims civilian casualties are in “single digits” when the evidence is right there for everyone to see what a bald-faced lie that is. So here we have two peas in a pod, Brennan and the “female agent,” both guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, rewarded for their “service to the country,” promoted for the evil they have done and continue to do. What an obscenity! The drone wars have killed at least 4,700 (Sen. Lindsey Graham); no one knows how many wounded or how many civilians. I’m sending pictures again showing 6 children we killed in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012, and a 10 year old with his leg blown off by a Hellfire missile—none were insurgent threats to the U.S. Nor were Afghan villagers like Hayat Gul, a school guard wounded in a battle between the Taliban and Afghan and NATO forces, or the aged Ghulam Rasool, who abandon his mountain home in a village in the Hisarak district because of the relentless drones (benghai, they call them—“buzzing flies”) and the constant threat of death by Hellfire. You and Brennan and the CIA and the whole military-industrial complex are conducting a War of Terror, a war that is a crime against humanity, Mr. President. There are many many people who are responsible for these atrocities but no one has ever been held accountable while those who expose them are sent to prison—whistle-blowers like John Kiriakou and Bradley Manning. And that is another obscenity, call it the collateral damage of the obscenity of war.