Every Field a Killing Field

[whoami]

Every Field a Killing Field

by Preston Peet- for DrugWar.com

US President GW Bush has further loosened the reigns governing who the CIA is allowed to kill without asking permission, anywhere it deems necessary if they first label the targets as terrorists. This is, as reported by the New York Times (Dec. 15, 2002- free NYTimes, only if "civilian casualties can be minimized." Apparently the Bush-legalized killing of some innocent civilian bystanders as well as accused terrorists by both the CIA and the US military, is not to be considered terroristic but rather justified brutality in the name of Homeland safety and security, false premises both.

While shocking in its open disregard for any sort of due process, Bush's list of allowable targets, subject to admendment at any time, is an expansion of an order first publicized back in October 2001, and does not exactly issue in a new state of affairs. Killing so-called threats is not a new phenomenon, it is a stock in trade in official US foreign, and even sometimes domestic policies.

One would have to be naive to believe that the CIA and US military did not and do not plan, support, and carry out terror and assassinations around the world when it sees fit to do so. Such actions did not stop even after the ban on such behavior was signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976, after the Church Comittee disclosed the rampant use of terror and assassination tactics by US intelligence services and many of its allies.

The US has engaged in killing both overtly and covertly for years, and isn't showing the slightest sign of letting up any time soon. Federal, and on occassion state and local police agencies, have shown no hesitation over killing foreign and US citizens in the past. With the current administration doing everything in its power to keep as much secret from the people it works for as it can, how can we trust that everyone who makes it onto the list is a legitimate target? Who would the assassin and those who choose the targets answer to? Who will reign them in if, or rather when, the abuses sink to the former depths that necessitated Ford's order banning assassinations in the first place? The Bush Administration insists it has not rescinded Ford's ban. Therefore this new order is one more sign that the current Bush administration does not consider itself bound by the same laws that hold the rest of the world, including private US citizens, accountable.

The US has not only allied itself with myriad death squads and torturers, bombers and dictators right up to this day, but has gone so far as to support them with funds, arms, training and active advisors. The only new part of Bush's latest declaration is that he is attempting to legalize said behavior.

While defending oneself and one's country is noble and understandable, it would seem that by utilizing the tactics of those one deems evil necessarily leads to acts of evil by all sides instead of any real problem solving. There's the added problem of deciding exactly who is a terrorist threat. Would a cop who handcuffs a man then shoots him be legitimately considered a terrorist? How about an Israeli settler who shoots a Palestinian because someone in his family was blown up in a bus by a Palestinian whose brother was shot by an Israeli soldier enforcing curfews? Where does the killing stop? Is it only the US government who is legitimately allowed to carry out assassinations, or are other countries also allowed to kill whomever they consider threatening? Upon one moment's reflection, it would appear this "new" policy will lead to ever more tit-for-tat murder and strife. It's hard to build a positive on top of two negatives.

When attacks on US citizens anywhere in the world are reported, I myself feel an overwhelming sense of empathy and anger. I also think, "there but for the grace of god go I." I imagine that the people of other countries must feel similar feelings. So how am I, a resident of NYC and therefore a fairly recent target of terrorist attack, going to accuse someone of committing unjustified terrorism if they respond to US missiles killing however many of their own by retaliating likewise? As Episcopalian Bishop Paul Moore said in Washington, DC recently, "for millions of people in many parts of the world, we in the US are the terrorists."

How are we ever going to build a better world that is honestly safer for us AND our children, as US politicians and prohibitionists like to say they're seeking, if we ourselves resort to acts of base terror in search of peace?


http://www.drugwar.com/pciahitsrevisit.shtm