The War Against Terror comes home and goes after the Cowboys!

Repost from Gregory Krasovsky (https://www.facebook.com/gkrasovsky):

The other day, a FB friend made the following comments on the current Ammon Bundy armed stand-off in Oregon:

"Call me crazy, but perhaps the use of drone strikes against armed terrorists should begin at home."

This struck my "card-carrying member of the ACLU" nerve and I responded as follows:

[Friend] I've known you a long time. To be honest, I'm disappointed and a little frightened with your comments -- "perhaps the use of drone strikes against armed terrorists should begin at home" -- for several reasons:

1. Drone strikes have killed thousands of innocent women and children around the world.

2. Drone strikes are state-ordered executions of merely suspects (people who are innocent until proven guilty) without constitutional due process, including a trial by a jury of their peers.

3. Bundy and his followers may be naive and foolish, but they haven't killed, hurt or taken hostage any people. Moreover, they haven't struck any vital civilian infrastructure (e.g. power stations, transportation hubs) that could cause damage to people, the economy or real national security.

4. Labeling domestic protesters -- when they're armed to protect themselves against federal law enforcement (last year over 1100 people were killed by police in the U.S.) -- as terrorists supports the philosophy and propaganda of many totalitarian regimes around the world who conveniently label armed opposition as terrorists to kill or incarcerate them without due process.

5. The following confrontations between activists who challenged state and/or federal laws and law enforcement have shown that your approach of "let's bomb these nuts" leads to deaths not only of the participants on both sides but also of innocent people, including women and children

The Pine Ridge Shootout 1975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation

MOVE Sieges of 1978 and 1985
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE

Ruby Ridge siege 1992
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge

Waco siege 1993
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

6. When anti-terrorist legislation was enacted after the 9/11/2001 attacks, a number of law enforcement professionals, political scientists, attorneys, politicians and human rights activists expressed concern that the ulterior motive behind such laws was not to prevent future attacks by Al Qaeda but to grant our government additional (and unconstitutional) powers to combat future domestic dissenters, protesters and activists, who would be conveniently labeled as terrorists and treated as their Al Qaeda or ISIS counterparts, regardless of their American citizenship and actions on domestic soil.

Experts were also concerned with main-stream corporate media and government propaganda that was being used to prepare the U.S. population to accept such treatment of domestic "terrorists"

Now, I'm seeing a fellow Columbia University graduate (both College and Law School!) repeat this stuff!

7. As a former police officer and an attorney, I don't condone attacks on law enforcement and don't feel sorry for people who do so without the only mitigating factor possible -- self-defense against police brutality and unjustified use of deadly force by law enforcement.

But I cannot justify either as an attorney or a law enforcement supporter the unjustified and often disproportionate use of deadly force by any government agency (federal, state or local) against protesters or activists, especially when such abuse of police powers clearly violates our constitutional rights.

8. With all that in mind, please re-consider your statement -- after you read the linked article on the greater issue of federal land use rights that has gotten farmers like Bundy and Hammonds all worked up to the point of armed civil disobedience -- as statements like yours could lead our country down the slippery slope toward a police state or a totalitarian one.

********

The War Against the Cowboys

The Oregon stand off and US imperialism

by Justin Raimondo, January 04, 2016

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/01/03/the-war-against-the-cowboys/

"The Hammond case has become a cause celebre West of the Mississippi, where federal control of huge swathes of real estate has become a life and death issue for ranchers and others who make their living off the land. As the feds encroach on their livelihood, they are pushing back, and nothing illustrates this better than the Hammond case.

In 2001, the Hammonds started a controlled burn on their own land to eliminate invasive junipers from ruining grazing for cattle: the fire spread to neighboring federal lands. As the Tri-State Livestock News reports:

“The first fire, in 2001, was a planned burn on Hammonds’ own property to reduce juniper trees that have become invasive in that part of the country. That fire burned outside the Hammonds’ private property line and took in 138 acres of unfenced BLM land before the Hammonds got it put out. No BLM firefighters were needed to help extinguish the fire and no fences were damaged.

“’They called and got permission to light the fire,’ Dwight’s wife, Susan, said, adding that was customary for ranchers conducting range management burns – a common practice in the area.

“’We usually called the interagency fire outfit – a main dispatch – to be sure someone wasn’t in the way or that weather wouldn’t be a problem.’ Susan said her son Steven was told that the BLM was conducting a burn of their own somewhere in the region the same day, and that they believed there would be no problem with the Hammonds going ahead with their planned fire. The court transcript includes a recording from that phone conversation.”

There was a second fire in 2006, started by Steven Hammond to counteract the lightning fires that threatened to envelope their land and their home. The Bureau of Land Management says that a single acre of federal land was affected by the fire –  and they pressed charges, even though lightning fires were raging all over the area and there was no way to determine which fires were burning what land.

The Hammonds were originally charged under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 with nine counts – including starting several other fires — but the jury saw otherwise and acquitted them of all but two counts: starting the fires they admitted to in the first place. The judge sentenced them to less than the federal mandatory, stating that what the government was asking – five years – was “disproportionate” and if imposed would’ve “shocked my conscience.”

The government wasn’t satisfied with that, and they appealed the decision. Judge Ann Aiken – the same judge who ruled that the prison system has a right to keep its safety standards confidential, even though a prisoner had died under dicey circumstances – agreed with the Justice Department, and the Hammonds must now serve full five-year sentences, minus time already served. They have agreed to turn themselves in, in spite of the protests on their behalf."

Reaper Madness: Obama’s Whack-a-Mole Killing Machine

Below are Greg Krasovsky's comments on Doug Noble's article, Reaper Madness: Obama’s Whack-a-Mole Killing Machine, published on November 9, 2015 at www.counterpunch.org  

The U.S. drone program kills people every week in many places around the world.

Drone-fired missiles 

- execute suspects who haven't been proved guilty in a court of law;

- kill suspects just because capturing them is deemed to expensive or dangerous; 

- are used in countries with which the U.S. is not at war and sometimes without the host country's formal legal authorization; and

- kill innocent women and children ("collateral damage") just because they happen to be in the vicinity of suspects.

Based on the above, IMHO the U.S. drone program is unconstitutional, illegal and includes many missions that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
  
How many Americans are willing to spend even an hour with any  surviving family of women and children who were killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere? What would we tell them to explain their loss and justify the drone strike? 

- I'm sorry, I'm not the one who pulled the trigger? 
  
- I trust my government, the CIA, NSA  and Pentagon to keep me safe and select terrorists for execution with minimum collateral damage in other countries? 
  
- I'm sure that our government will pay you some compensation?
  
- I just pay my taxes, vote and try to stay out of foreign politics?
   
- I'm not a lawyer, so whether what happened to your dead women & children is a crime should be investigated by the U.S. Justice Department and, if it decides that a crime was committed, the suspects should be tried in a U.S. federal court by a jury of my American peers.
   
- I know that my taxes fund the Drone program and bought the missiles that killed you women and children, but there's nothing that I can do? What? Write my Congressman, Senator, President?
  
- I didn't have the time (or, to be honest, the desire and will power) to research and protest against such a program? After all, I'm busy with work, children, TV, movies, music, sports and etc.
    
Are these morally defensible arguments? Is this what any one of us would like to tell G-d if questioned?
   
Guess what, folks? As tax payers and voters Americans bear direct responsibility for what the government & military that we finance with our taxes does at the behest of politicians that we put into office. 
   
Is this what the Founding Fathers of America would have wanted when they declared independence from The British Empire and drafted the U.S. Constitution?

Where's the outrage and protest?
  
Here are some excerpts:

"Targeted killing by drones remains the US weapon of choice, famously called “the only game in town,” by former CIA director Leon Panetta. This despite a decade of worldwide moral outrage over its overwhelming civilian casualties, violations of international law, disregard for national sovereignty, dismissal of due process, and continuing secrecy. 

The Obama administration recently announced that the drone killing program will in fact be increased by 50 % in the coming two years.

Now government documents leaked to the Intercept show conclusively that the US drone program kills thousands of innocents on bad intelligence and careless targeting while being falsely portrayed as a program of impeccable planning and precision execution. 

The recently leaked “Drone Papers” - see http://www.drone-papers.com - reveal the extent of willful ineptitude in US drone operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, which rely on systematically faulty intelligence and astonishing inaccuracies in identifying targets. These revelations only further confirm what many of us already knew about the appalling failure, relentless deception and criminal lethality of the US drone program.
...
The publication this year of the Drone Papers reveals that the Obama administration, the US military, and the CIA have been lying all along about the drone assassination  program, its targets and its civilian casualties. These documents also expose the obscene disregard for human lives pervading the entire operation, as the drone warriors pursue their technological dreams. 

“Throughout human history,” the Stimson Report reminds us, “the ability to project force across significant distances has been a much sought-after military capability… and since the dawn of mechanization, militaries have sought to replace people with machines.” In this context, drones are the unholy grail. 

The Drone Papers reveal that in its pursuit these Dr Strangeloves  have been well aware of the horrific human costs of their enterprise and that they couldn’t care less.

What I’ve tried to show here is something more:  that these military miscreants have also known all along that their drone technology and targeting strategy are militarily bankrupt. They could not but be aware from military history and doctrine that these approaches have  absolutely no possibility of defeating terrorist groups or keeping America safe. They must know that in fact the opposite is true, that  their nefarious enterprise only further endangers us all. 

And yet they will continue ever more brazenly their Reaper madness, the scholars here all agree, until we find some way to stop them."

Please read the rest of the article at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/09/reaper-madness-obamas-whack-a-mole-killing-machine/