Maine Owl

Escalation and drone war highlight a year of Obama. I had hoped for better.


Obama promises to "finish the job." Sound familiar?

I know he told us he'd put more war into Afghanistan during the 2008 campaign. But is escalating now to "dismantle and degrade" terrorists no longer there really worth it? And that's according to Obama's general himself. He's really just a bookend with Bush in the War Party.

Meanwhile, covert war with use of Blackwater (aka Xe) as a tool along with the Joint Special Ops drone aircraft rages in Pakistan:

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan: Jeremy Scahill Reveals Private Military Firm Operating in Pakistan Under Covert Assassination and Kidnapping Program
Democracy Now! 11-24-2009

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, explain who is behind the drone attacks in Pakistan, who has been killed, and talk about legality here.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. The CIA of course has been running a drone campaign in Pakistan going back years into the Bush administration. When President Obama took office on January 23, he ordered his first drone strike inside of Pakistan. There were two strikes in North and South Waziristan, and has bombed Pakistan regularly ever since. In fact, Vice-President Joe Biden, part of his strategy reportedly is calling for escalation of these drone strikes. This has caused some controversy because there of a large numbers of civilian deaths as a result of these bombings.

And technically, the operations of the CIA need to be reported to Senator Dianne Feinstein and others on the intelligence committee. and there was a controversy this summer because Leon Panetta ran up the hill and said he had cancelled the CIA assassination program and that sort of put the drones in an intense focus on the hill. What I am told now though, is that there is actually and has been for some time, a parallel drone strike program that is being run by the Joint Special Operations Command and that these JSOC drone strikes are sometimes done with very little regard for how many civilians may die in the pursuit of one quote unquote "Bad guy,"

In fact, my military intelligence source said to me if there's one guy we're trying to hit and there are 34 other people in the building, 35 people are going to die that day. And he said part of the reason why these strikes are happening is because JSOC works on a classified mandate and they really don?t care because they are not going to go to the Hill and talk to Congress about it and they are not going to face consequences, and its an open secret no one wants to talk about. [emphasis added]

Via Atrios, is this LINK to a review of "The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11" by John Farmer. For some years I've been trying to put as succinctly as reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn does exactly what the Terror War has been all about:

The Lies They Told
The New York Times | November 12, 2009

For all the trillions of dollars lavished on it, for all the talk about confronting new security threats, for all the exhortations to reinvent government, America?s defense establishment, as John Farmer reminds us in "The Ground Truth," continued to fight the cold war more than a decade after it had ended. ...

In trumpeting an ill-defined war against terrorism, Bush simply transposed the bombast of the cold war to the present to suggest that he was a new Churchill staring down evil and that America needed to combat a new totalitarian threat emerging from the Islamic world.

A whole new period of beating drums has emerged from stories of new "plots," the horrendous shooting spree of a madman at Fort Hood that wingnuttia all too easily fits into the rubric of Terror War, and upcoming New York circus trials of tortured suspects that Attorney General Holder announced this week. It's all part and parcel of the fear mongering that has proven so useful in keeping our country a bloodthirsty, revenge-thirsty purveyor of violence not just since 9/11, but for decades.

I don't mind telling you that I'm tired of it. War is making us broke, hated, and subject to blowback. It's time for new approaches that begin with standing down the foreign occupations, and the machinations of Terror War on all fronts.