We are trained and brainwashed to believe, of course, that foreign policy is too complicated for us mere citizens, and that the President and his minions have much more information than we do and must and should be trusted to deploy it to confound our enemies abroad.
"Liberal" information radio constantly re-emphasizes the point that we are incompetent to participate in foreign policy by employing think-tank pundits to field every question and comment and turn it back on the listener with some patronizing pronouncement or other.
(For example, CALLER: Why should everybody be in a lather about Iran and a possible nuclear weapon some day, when Israel already has 200-300 of those, won't admit it, and doesn't abide by any international agreements on nuclear weapons?
ANSWER: Israel is a special case; it's different; the President and the military and even Congress has special secret information about this; don't worry your pretty head.)
Eventually, the heart overrules the head. A schoolyard bully is still a schoolyard bully, even with the school board's attorney running interference.
I remember the exact moment I realized Barack Obama was mad. I suspected it even before he took office, having been trained by Johnson and Nixon and Ford and Carter and Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush to pay attention to the signs. But the moment I knew it, the pundit-proof moment, came at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
The supreme orator was in a jocular mood. One of the Jonas brothers (boy band singers) had been presuming to "date" one of Barack's daughters, apparently, and the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world outside the banking industry, wanted the young suitor to know that "I have two words for you: Predator Drone."
Bless me if the room didn't break out in riotous laughter! Maybe some of it was nervous laughter, like when Dubya performed his skit pretending to look for WMDs in the Oval Office.
(You could make a case that all you need to know about American foreign policy can be gleaned from one of the cheap seats at the White House Correspondents' Dinner).
Now I don't insist that the Jonas boy is as innocent as Anwar Al-Awlacki's 16-year-old son, but the image of even a boy band singer being vaporized or dismembered to preserve the virtue of the President's issue failed to fill me with mirth. Rather, it was like a cold knife to the heart. It said everything about how Barack Obama views the mounting civilian dead in his terrorist war against the terrorists. It said too much.
Drones are the mother's knee moment, the reductio ad absurdum of the Empire's program. You don't need a doctorate or a RAND corporation brief or an above top secret clearance to understand drones. You just have to follow your heart back to the schoolyard and imagine what it would be like to live under that reign (and rain) of terror. Congress didn't even have to do that. It was treated to first-person testimony the other day from a family that has lived under drones.
We have Rania Khalek's account in Truthout:
Pakistani school teacher Rafiq ur Rehman traveled over 7,000 miles with his children - 13-year-old Zubair and 9-year-old Nabila - from a small, remote village in North Waziristan to tell lawmakers about the US drone strike that killed his 67-year-old mother, Mamana Bibi.
"On October 24, 2012, a CIA drone killed my mother and injured my children," Rehman said, speaking through a translator. And so began the first time members of Congress heard a drone victim tell their story.
"Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day," he continued. "Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother's house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed. But only one person was killed that day.
"She was the string that held our family together. Since her death, the string has been broken, and life has not been the same. We feel alone and we feel lost."
Rehman was returning from buying groceries when he learned his mother had been killed. "When I heard this news, all the groceries---the fruits and sweets I had bought---just fell from my hands. It was as if a limb had been cut from my body to hear the news of my mother's death," he told Truthout.
"All my neighbors and relatives were telling me to come immediately to the mosque because they were going to start the prayers. But I said no, I want to go to my house, I want to see my mom's face before they bury her to rest. They were telling me that no, you don't want to see the condition she is in," said Rehman. "Later, I realized that because she was blown to pieces, they collected whatever they could and put it in a box. I wanted to see my mom's face for the last time but they had taken her remains and put it into a box."
The day before, Eid and Rehman's mother was outside with eight of her grandchildren picking okra. Both Zubair and Nabila said they noticed a drone overhead but, as Zubair explained, "I wasn't worried because we are not militants."
Nabila described to Truthout what happened next. "All of the sudden I heard this 'dum dum' noise, and I saw these two white lights come down and hit right where my grandmother was. Everything had become dark, and it was smelling weird. I was really scared and didn't know what to do so I started to run, and I just kept running and running," she said.
"I felt some pain in my hand. When I looked, it was bleeding. I tried to bandage it and wipe it with my scarf to stop the bleeding but the blood just kept coming out. I had lost a lot of blood. Next thing I know I ended up in a hospital and it was evening time."
Zubair's experience was equally as horrific. "My grandmother was blown up into pieces, and I got injured in my leg," he told Truthout. "At the funeral, everyone was trying to console me, saying, 'We all lost a grandmother.' There was no one else like her. She would always make sure that we would have something to eat, and she would always make our favorite meals or buy our favorite fruits from the market."
Zubair has since undergone multiple surgeries to have shrapnel removed from his leg. Medical costs have piled up, forcing Rehman to borrow money and sell his land to pay for treatment. In the meantime, the US government has yet to provide an explanation for the strike or offer any compensation to the family for their loss, which appears to be a widespread problem. The peace group Codepink recently discovered that over the last four years, not a single dime of the $40 million allocated by Congress for that purpose has gone to Pakistani victims of drone strikes.
"Before, I would hear the drones but I didn't think much of it. I would just go about my daily life. I'd want to go to school. There would hardly be a time that I would refuse to go outside," Zubair told Truthout. "But now, after I've seen what's happened to me and my family and that I've had two operations, I'm scared. I don't want to go outside anymore. I don't feel like playing cricket, volleyball and soccer with my friends. I don't even want to go to school. I just fear every time I hear the noise overhead."
Zubair added that there are already too few schools in his community and due to the fear of drone strikes, "students have stopped going to the ones that exist," echoing a report published last year by Stanford and NYU, in which researchers observed that the presence of US drones buzzing over northwest Pakistan 24 hours a day "terrorizes men, women and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities," who "have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves." As a result, "Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school."
"As a teacher, my job is to educate. But how do I teach something like this? How do I explain what I myself do not understand?" asked Rehman, bringing his translator to tears. "How can I in good faith reassure the children that the drone will not come back and kill them, too, if I do not understand why it killed my mother and injured my children?"
"In the end I would just like to ask the American public to treat us as equals. Make sure that your government gives us the same status of a human with basic rights as they do to their own citizens," said Rehman. "This indiscriminate killing has to end, and justice must be delivered to those who have suffered at the hands of the unjust."
You see? This testimony would suffice in any schoolyard. People of goodwill do not treat other people like this. Only governments do, and they do it by keeping their own people ignorant of what is being done in their name. They do it by isolating policy from any possible influence by democratic forces.
When is the last time, by exercising your right to vote, or by petitioning Congress or the White House, you had any discernible effect on American foreign policy, whether it was wielded by Democrat or Republican?
But the other day, finally, in the halls of Congress assembled, the truth was heard. Drones are terrorism, which is why they fuel terrorism, as the young martyr girl Malala tried to tell Obama recently.
Unfortunately, Congress assembled fell a little short. Only five Congresspersons showed up for the testimony of the Rehman family. No doubt they had more important business elsewhere. Fundraising, maybe.
But no matter, it's the President who makes foreign policy, right? To the extent permitted by the military-industrial-financial-intelligence complex, er, community. So what was Mr. Obama's reaction? Who knows? He was busy, too, meeting with Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin CEOs, makers of, you guessed it, drones.
You may be sure the think tank pundits will spin this one three ways from Thursday. Or maybe they'll just let it die an unrequited death, sucked down the news cycle memory hole. In a few days there will be as little left of this story as there was of Grandma. War is hell. Get over it.
Our government is not accountable to these people. It is accountable only to our own people, whom the government is sworn to protect, and who don't understand foreign policy because it's very complicated and the public doesn't know what the President knows and can't be expected to make decisions based on ignorance which is necessary for the safety and security of the people, to whom the government, which is very busy, can't be expected to be accountable.
So it will go. But somewhere, somewhere in the schoolyard of every imagination, the bully with the drones will always and instantly be recognized for what he is. Experts assure us the President has a very tough job. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
But uneasier, one can hope, the heart.
::Union Paradise®
No comments:
Post a Comment