May 2, 2013
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April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with
the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not
this year.
There are few in Boston who were not touched in some
way by the marathon bombings on April 15 and the tense week that
followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs
went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second
suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier was
murdered right outside my office building.
It's rare for
privileged Westerners to see, graphically, what many others experience
daily - for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the
marathon bombings.
On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist
Farea Al-Muslimi, who had studied at an American high school, testified
before a US Senate committee that right after the marathon bombings, a
drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target.
The
strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United
States - something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to
accomplish.
His neighbors had admired the US, Al-Muslimi told the
committee, but "Now, however, when they think of America, they think of
the fear they feel at the drones over their heads. What radicals had
previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike
accomplished in an instant."
Rack up another triumph for President
Obama's global assassination program, which creates hatred of the
United States and threats to its citizens more rapidly than it kills
people who are suspected of posing a possible danger to us someday.
The
target of the Yemeni village assassination, which was carried out to
induce maximum terror in the population, was well-known and could easily
have been apprehended, Al-Muslimi said. This is another familiar
feature of the global terror operations.
There was no direct way
to prevent the Boston murders. There are some easy ways to prevent
likely future ones: by not inciting them. That's also true of another
case of a suspect murdered, his body disposed of without autopsy, when
he could easily have been apprehended and brought to trial: Osama bin
Laden.
This murder too had consequences. To locate bin Laden, the
CIA launched a fraudulent vaccination campaign in a poor neighborhood,
then switched it, uncompleted, to a richer area where the suspect was
thought to be.
The CIA operation violated fundamental principles
as old as the Hippocratic oath. It also endangered health workers
associated with a polio vaccination program in Pakistan, several of whom
were abducted and killed, prompting the UN to withdraw its anti-polio
team.
The CIA ruse also will lead to the deaths of unknown numbers
of Pakistanis who have been deprived of protection from polio because
they fear that foreign killers may still be exploiting vaccination
programs.
Columbia University health scientist Leslie Roberts
estimated that 100,000 cases of polio may follow this incident; he told
Scientific American that "people would say this disease, this crippled
child is because the US was so crazy to get Osama bin Laden."
And
they may choose to react, as aggrieved people sometimes do, in ways that
will cause their tormentors consternation and outrage.
Even more
severe consequences were narrowly averted. The US Navy SEALs were under
orders to fight their way out if necessary. Pakistan has a well-trained
army, committed to defending the state. Had the invaders been
confronted, Washington would not have left them to their fate. Rather,
the full force of the US killing machine might have been used to
extricate them, quite possibly leading to nuclear war.
There is a
long and highly instructive history showing the willingness of state
authorities to risk the fate of their populations, sometimes severely,
for the sake of their policy objectives, not least the most powerful
state in the world. We ignore it at our peril.
There is no need to ignore it right now. A remedy is investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill's just-published Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battleground.
In
chilling detail, Scahill describes the effects on the ground of US
military operations, terror strikes from the air (drones), and the
exploits of the secret army of the executive branch, the Joint Special
Operations Command, which rapidly expanded under President George W.
Bush, then became a weapon of choice for President Obama.
We
should bear in mind an astute observation by the author and activist
Fred Branfman, who almost single-handedly exposed the true horrors of
the US "secret wars" in Laos in the 1960s, and their extensions beyond.
Considering
today's JSOC-CIA-drones/killing machines, Branfman reminds us about the
Senate testimony in 1969 of Monteagle Stearns, US deputy chief of
mission in Laos from 1969 to 1972.
Asked why the US rapidly
escalated its bombing after President Johnson had ordered a halt over
North Vietnam in November 1968, Stearns said, "Well, we had all those
planes sitting around and couldn't just let them stay there with nothing
to do." So we can use them to drive poor peasants in remote villages of
northern Laos into caves to survive, even penetrating within the caves
with our advanced technology.
JSOC and the drones are a
self-generating terror machine that will grow and expand, meanwhile
creating new potential targets as they sweep much of the world. And the
executive won't want them just "sitting around."
It wouldn't hurt to contemplate another slice of history, at the dawn of the 20th century.
In
his book "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines
and the Rise of the Surveillance State," the historian Alfred McCoy
explores in depth the US pacification of the Philippines after an
invasion that killed hundreds of thousands through savagery and torture.
The
conquerors established a sophisticated surveillance and control system,
using the most advanced technology of the day to ensure obedience, with
consequences for the Philippines that reach to the present.
And
as McCoy demonstrates, it wasn't long before the successes found their
way home, where such methods were employed to control the domestic
population - in softer ways to be sure, but not very attractive ones.
We
can expect the same. The dangers of unexamined and unregulated monopoly
power, particularly in the state executive, are hardly news. The right
reaction is not passive acquiescence.
© 2012 The New
York Times Company Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be
reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative
Commons license.
Noam
Chomsky's new book is ''Power Systems: Conversations on Global
Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire. Conversations
with David Barsamian.''
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