Rachel Maddow Questions Legality Of Anwar al-Awlaki Killing
Of course there are legal questions about the killing of an American citizen without due process!
Commentary: An unasked question
There's an angle to all this that wants to be discussed, and seems on the tip of someone's tongue, yet never comes out: they killed this guy because they say he's one of the top 3 most dangerous people in the world, that he's encouraged people to kill Americans and deserves summary execution. If you've been watching TV or reading the papers, you've seen the arguments.
What you may not have seen is an unasked question: let's say we kill the top 3 today, then the next top 3 the day after, and so on. How many top 3's are there out there, and how many are being recruited by the killings?
How many people in this world of 6 billion, with over 1 billion being Muslim, hate Americans? Is that number growing or lessening?
Without any more examination, it must be clear that we'll be killing people for generations to come. Even if we kill 3,000 people who hate us a week, it will take a year to kill less then 1% of a population that size.
And, at exactly what point does the blowback start? Does anyone know? Seems to me that having sown so much hatred for us among so many people, it's only a matter of time before we're attacked again. Perhaps in a big way, for some of us.
The invasion of Iraq, alone, killed - murdered - hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The pain of the survivors reaches across the Middle East, all the way to Palestine, so these extra-judicial murders are merely pints of gas on a raging fire.
And now innocent people are being murdered by robots in the sky. Not just a few, thousands of them have been built. Maybe they cover thousands of miles each day? Think about how would you feel if one of those machines flew over your neighborhood? Would you cower - for how long? - or would you join some army to make them go away, for good?
We're at least a decade into the "might makes right" handling of the hatred we've sown with Muslims over our one-side backing of Israel and the bullying of nations throughout the Middle East, and of treating Arabs/Muslims with less respect then they demand. The disgraceful treatment of the Palestinians has been going on for decades and it's nothing less then American's disgrace and shame. It's not hard to understand why a growing number of people in the Middle East and perhaps around the world would hate us.
We've got no shortage of enemies, and with each passing day and more people killed in our name, by the Neocon war on terror, the list only grows. We can kill them by the truckload, hourly, and there will be another truckload. We simply can't kill them all. We slaughtered some 3 million people in Vietnam, and they still kept coming. Was that a lesson to anyone? And Pakistan alone has over 160 million people.
It's insanity - that's what we're looking at with this country's behavior in the Middle East - all in our name. When will Americans accept that might does NOT make right, and an eye for an eye will only make us all blind (Ghandi).
Further thinking will lead one to wonder if the people who seized America's media and political strings (among others!), the NeoCon gang and their tentacles, are actually crazy. Perhaps gifted in some ways, but loony as a hatter in another. It's possible.
Or, perhaps they have a twisted plan to keep escalating until something Big pops to gives them the excuse to pull out the Big Guns and kill their enemies by the millions.
Maybe they rationalize as vital for the security of Israel, or even a globally necessary population control? Regardless, they are on a mission to establish military authority in the Middle East. They argue that while we still have the advantage and power to wipe out our enemies without a M.A.D. response, we should use it. Reading the NeoCon PNAC Statement of Principles provides some insight into the workings of the mind that thinks this way, and the one that has already duped us into the launching of that invasion.
Bill
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