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Lethal Presidency Of Barack Obama: It Is Long Past Time We Met The Victims – Who Are The Others?
By Charles P. Pierce / Information Clearing House
September 26, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – The war that the United States is waging — a war, let it be noted, that the United States is waging purely at the behest of its president, who is currently standing for re-election, and a war for which the consent of the governed was never sought — claimed six more people the other day in Pakistan. One of them was a “senior al-Qaeda figure,” whatever that means, and we do not know what it means because the president who is waging the war would rather we not know what it means anymore. I am not here to discuss him. I am here to discuss The Others.
According to that story, which is sourced by McClatchy to an anonymous “intelligence official,” there were five Others. The stories also calls them “Islamist insurgents,” but they have no names that are important enough for the intelligence official to leak, so there is no good reason for a properly skeptical citizen of a self-governing republic to believe that part of the story. They remain The Others.
What if the anonymous official is lying? What if the anonymous official is just, you know, wrong? What if one of the Others was a date farmer, or a cab driver, or someone on his way to prayer? Then we must ask ourselves questions about these Others on whom we are making war, even if we are making war on them accidentally, as if that matters when you’ve been roasted alive by modern ordinance dropped on you by a flying robot. Do the Others have parents? Do they have grandparents? Do the Others have siblings, who now watch the clear blue skies in terror every day, the way New Yorkers did for a few months after 9/11? Do the Others have spouses who miss them? Do the Others have children who wonder why the Others haven’t come home from work yet? Do the Others have circles of friends who talk about the hole that is left in their daily lives, who talk about corny old jokes the Others used to tell, or stories about when one of the Others tripped on a rock or fell in a creek, or offer prayers for the souls of the Others every day? The bell, one presumes, tolls for the Others as much as it tolls for me, or thee, or anybody else anywhere.
What do the people who knew the Others think about their deaths? They were not the Others to the people who knew them. They were fathers and sons, and uncles and aunts, and nephews and nieces. They were the nice guy with the date stand, or the woman who smiled when she sold you some flowers, or the old gentleman who always stopped by the little cafe for tea and conversation. They were the guy who gave you the ride to the airport, or the young man who wanted to be a doctor, or someone who just happened to be going east on the road when the Hellfire came down the road going west. They are the people whose businesses are blasted to rubble, whose lives and homes are shattered, and who have to somehow cobble together the money that it costs to heal the wounds inflicted by modern ordinance. The Others don’t know that what we really meant to do was kill the “senior al-Qaeda figure” who was standing at the fruit stand. They don’t care, either, because we killed the Others, too, who were only standing around waiting to buy oranges. The fact that you weren’t targeted to be killed doesn’t make you any less dead. It doesn’t salve the grief of your family or placate the rage of your neighbors. Or vice versa, for all that. What do the Others think about us? Because, from their perspective, we are the Others, and the Others are sending machines to kill them.
continue article at Information Clearing House:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32558.htm
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They’re still trying to unearth all who vanished under the evil gw bush regime and criminal empire.