It was an ordinary-looking room located in an office building in northern Virginia. The place was filled with computer monitors, keyboards, and maps. Someone sat at a desk with his hand on a joystick. John A. Rizzo, who was serving as the CIA’s acting general counsel, hovered nearby, along with other people from the agency. Together they watched images on a screen that showed a man and his family traveling down a road thousands of miles away. The vehicle slowed down, and the man climbed out.

A moment later, an explosion filled the screen, and the man was dead. “It was very businesslike,” says Rizzo. An aerial drone had killed the man, a high-level terrorism suspect, after he had gotten out of the vehicle, while members of his family were spared. “The agency was very punctilious about this,” Rizzo says. “They tried to minimize collateral damage, especially women and children.”

Drones are doing the same thing a death squad would do. Imagine if a squad of soldiers tailed him and his family and when he got out unarmed they walked up to him, put him on his knees and shot him in the head while his family watched in horror. That's what liberals in the United States are allowing and the rest of the left is incapable of stopping.

These drones can leisurely follow any target around for days. The people they follow aren't armed that entire time. It would be possible to capture rather than kill the target.

The focus is to kill rather than capture because soldiers are political parasites who refuse to sacrifice by doing the right thing, which would be to capture suspects rather than kill them. The right thing is usally more difficult to do than the doing the wrong thing, an elementary concept that most troops find impossible to comprehend.

Also, since soldiers get a political voice and representation in this country they can heavily affect policy decisions which go in their favor. The main reason these strikes are taking place is to protect soldiers. Up to 40,000 Pakistanis have died because of the hatred the U.S. military has created in the region, but of course the troops whine about how they get fired at from Pakistan and can't retaliate. So far they've lost less than 2,000 over the course of more than 10 years.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Cambodia was bombed in a campaign that destabilized the nation and allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power and eventually led to the deaths of up to 1.7 million people. This was, of course, done for the troops.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Afterword_Sideshow.html

"Now, with respect to Cambodia, it is another curious bit of mythology. People usually refer to the bombing of Cambodia as if it had been unprovoked, secretive U.S. action. The fact is that we were bombing North Vietnamese troops that had invaded Cambodia, that were killing many Americans from these sanctuaries, and we were doing it with the acquiescence of the Cambodian government, which never once protested against it, and which, indeed, encouraged us to do it. I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved and why Cambodian neutrality should apply to only one country. Why is it moral for the North Vietnamese to have 50,000 to 100,000 troops in Cambodia, why should we let them kill Americans from that territory, and why, when the government concerned never once protested, and indeed told us that if we bombed unpopulated areas that they would not notice, why in all these conditions is there a moral issue? And, finally, I think it is fair to say that in the six years of the war, not ten percent of the people had been killed in Cambodia than had been killed in one year of Communist rule."

Note the emphasis on American (read: troop) lives.

Of course the United States did nothing about the subsequent genocide in Cambodia because the United States does not and never has cared about the Holocaust, a point the Left really needs to start making. Intervention would have been fine if soldiers knew their own lives were less than civilians and a high civilian body count would be considered an embarassing failure deserving of no gratitude or respect. After the Khmer Rouge was ousted they should have been allowed any government they wanted, including an anti-U.S. one, as long as the mass killings stop.

Soldiers would hate their officers for subordinating their lives on behalf of foreign civilians and officers would hate the civilian population for putting them in a position where they have to sacrifice their soldier's lives for what they would perceive as being leftist ideals.

The idea should be to harness the military and mitigate the effect they have on the population they invade and prevent assholes like Petraeus from doing something like this:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/12/petraeus-almost-quit-over-obama-drawdown-in-afhanistan/1

She describes how Petraeus' first act was to lift McChrystal's restrictions on the use of force -- especially on airstrikes -- if civilians were nearby.

"There is no question about our commitment to reducing civilian loss of life," Petraeus told his staff. There was, however, "a clear moral imperative to make sure we are fully supporting our troops in combat."

For another example of the detrimental effects soldiers have on the ideals of the United States read the following:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/31/usa.rwanda

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time.
Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Why did the liberal Clinton administration not use the word "genocide" when describing the atrocities happening in that nation?

The administration did not want to repeat the fiasco of US intervention in Somalia, where US troops became sucked into fighting.

Because 18 precious troops died in Mogadishu.

So the world stood by as 800,000 people were slaughtered because a precious troop may have to sacrifice for an ideal involving genuine sympathy for genocide victims.

Of course when four contractors were strung up in Fallujah in 2004 the marines intervened in a hateful mission of revenge and increased violence year after year afterward.

If it's hateful or selfish the military will always support it. If it even hints at any leftist ideal they'll recoil in horror and nothing will be done. One of the reasons liberals in the U.S. will never confront the military on this is because soldiers sacrifice and die on a battlefield, which gives them special political credibility. It is never considered that the victims of U.S. military action or inaction always sacrifice and die in far greater numbers under far worse conditions for a far longer period of time and unlike soldiers never have a choice.

Also, Dennis Kucinich had a really good idea but LOL HE LOOKS LIKE A HOBBIT LOL so nobody took it seriously, but the Department of Peace should have caused something similar to the occupy movement. The worthless Left wouldn't take an activist stance so it went nowhere and nobody took it seriously but it was a civilian counterweight to military influence.

Just look at some of the provisions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Peace

To build peace making efforts among conflicting cultures both here and abroad.

Assumption of a more proactive level of involvement in the establishment of international dialogues for international conflict resolution (as a cabinet level department).

Establishment of a U.S. Peace Academy, which among other things would train international peace-keepers

Development of an educational media program to promote nonviolence in the domestic media.

Receiving a timely mandatory advance consultation from the Secretaries of State, and of Defense, prior to any engagement of U.S. troops in any armed conflict with any other nation.

Monitoring of human rights, both domestically and abroad.

Making regular recommendations to the President for the maintenance and improvement of these human rights.

Participation by the secretary of peace as a member of the National Security Council.

And it would have cost a tiny fraction of what the military receives.

http://www.thepeacealliance.org/tools-education/working-with-media/laser-talks.html

The federal government spends about $400 billion per year on the Department of Defense yet only a small fraction on education. Of all the money we spend each year on our defense and war machine, we only spend about $5 billion on foreign aid. The Department of Peace would cost the equivalent of 2% of the budget of the Department of Defense, and will create a Peace Academy, similar to the concept of a military services academy, which will be a five-year training in proven techniques in conflict mediation and conflict resolution. So we'll have people just as skilled at winning the peace as we have people skilled at winning the war, for only a fraction of the cost.

I know a lot of you are cynical sarcastic assholes but knowing a proposal like this even exists makes me so sad. $1 million per soldier so they can massacre peasants for primitive hateful reasons and then there's this. I would give anything to join something like this, I don't care if it's a failed leftist pipe dream.

Proposals like the above get no traction when there's no popular support. So far the only real international activist opposition to the military has been Wikileaks and they really changed... things... ?

Edited by internationalist (Feb. 9, 2012 22:08:24)

internationalist posted:
I was thinking of putting this in Goethestein's "liberals are worthless thread" but it has some important lessons

lol

also your recounting of how rwanda went down is completely wrong. the US didn't intervene because their puppets were winning and nearly all of the killing was the result of a US-sponsored and -approved invasion.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/hp020911.html

Here, again, the casting of perpetrators and victims was clear: These roles paralleled the long-standing U.S. and British hostility towards Rwanda's Hutu-majority government under President Juvenal Habyarimana, and their alignment with the armed forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). But in Rwanda, a third role was cast for the alleged savior of the country from the Hutu "genocidaires," and assigned to the man who, in the words of the Guardian's chief Africa correspondent Chris McGreal, is the "former Tutsi rebel leader who ended the genocide has been heralded as the Abraham Lincoln of Africa"29 -- Paul Kagame.

These assigned perpetrator-victim-savior roles, followed closely by the Guardian since the April-July 1994 period, turn the fundamental realities of the Rwandan conflict upside down, a fact that becomes clearer when one examines the atrocities of those four months within the context of the entire 20-year ascent and geographical spread of Kagame's power. 30

Kagame trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1990. When the RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda on October 1 of that year, even wearing the uniforms of the Ugandan army, not only did the United States and Britain not protest this act of aggression, they also prevented the UN Security Council from taking any action on Rwanda until March 1993,31 following a major RPF offensive that proved its superiority over the Army of the Rwandan government, displaced one million persons, and greatly weakened the Habyarimana government. Through the start of April 1994, it was crucial to what would become the establishment narrative of the "Rwandan genocide" that the RPF's aggression and occupation of the northern part of the country, its rapid increase in troop and weapons strength,32 its political penetration of the Rwandan state under Western-imposed power-sharing agreements, its military offensives, and its massacres and large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Hutu population, all be kept as quiet as possible, and that reporting feature instead Hutu perfidy and Tutsi victimhood. The Guardian (along with the rest of the establishment U.S. and U.K. media) met this challenge.33

The "triggering event" in the mass killings of 1994 and after was the shooting down of Habyarimana's jet during its landing approach to the airport in Kigali on April 6. In standard accounts of the "Rwandan genocide," responsibility for this incident is assigned to Hutu extremists around Habyarimana, who, facing a loss of power and privileges under the Arusha peace and power-sharing accords of August 1993, assassinated their president rather than accept the implementation of the accords and then launched their plan to exterminate Rwanda's Tutsi population.34

But a serious problem for this Hutu conspiracy model arose in 1997, when Michael Hourigan, a principal investigator for the Rwanda Tribunal, found RPF informants who attested to the "direct involvement" of Kagame,35 and then in 2006, when French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière also concluded that Kagame had needed and was responsible for this political assassination.36

In the face of these awkward facts, the Guardian stood by the party-line. Despite its passing mentions of Bruguière's conclusion that "Kagame gave direct orders" to assassinate Habyarimana,37 the Guardian has regularly reported that Habyarimana "probably died at the hand of Hutu extremists opposed to the concessions he had made to the Tutsi rebels,"38 in Chris McGreal's words; years later, when the trial of Hutu Colonel Theoneste Bagosora began at the Rwanda Tribunal in 2002, McGreal wrote that the shoot-down was "probably on Col. Bagosora's orders," and "within hours" Bagasora hosted a meeting at which the "extermination of Tutsis" was discussed.39 More striking yet, Michael Hourigan's name has been mentioned only once in the history of the Guardian-Observer's reporting on Rwanda: By us, in our July 20, 2011 contribution to the Guardian's Response column.40

Apart from the compelling direct evidence that the shoot-down was Kagame's handiwork, there are also the facts that Kagame's RPF mobilized its troops within two hours of the event, and that it was this final RPF offensive that enabled Kagame's forces to quickly conquer Rwanda, rather than face elections in 1995 that he and his minority Tutsi surely would have lost.41 Moreover, the government of Rwanda at the time was a coalition government that had several strategically placed Tutsi members; Alison Des Forges, perhaps the most important advocate for the Hutu conspiracy model, admitted at the Rwanda Tribunal that there was little likelihood that the coalition Hutu and Tutsi government could have planned the assassination and the extermination of the Tutsi, without the knowledge of its Tutsi members.42 But the Guardian never confronts this set of problems. The Hutu conspiracy model is sacrosanct.

In standard accounts, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is taken as a genuine judicial enterprise, not as the instrument of victor's justice and guarantor of RPF immunity that it was and remains. This parallels the establishment treatment of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, both tribunals creations of NATO and closely reflecting its biases and political demands. The ICTR's huge bias has been displayed, first, in the fact that no Tutsi has ever been indicted by it, although vast crimes have been committed by the RPF from 1990 onward.43 In one notable incident, the former ICTR prosecution expert Filip Reyntjens resigned his post in open protest at this unjustified bias and impunity. "It is precisely because the regime in Kigali has been given a sense of impunity that, during the years following 1994, it has committed massive internationally recognized crimes in both Rwanda and the DRC," Reyntjens wrote in his letter of resignation.44 Another dramatic illustration of the ICTR bias and role was chief prosecutor Louise Arbour's refusal in 1997 to accept Hourigan's evidence on Kagame's responsibility for the shoot-down of Habyarimana's jet, and the ICTR's failure to address this event to the present. Nevertheless, the Guardian takes the ICTR as a genuine instrument of justice, with Chris McGreal providing testimony for its prosecution of Hutu defendants, just like Ed Vulliamy testified for the prosecution of Serb defendants at the Yugoslavia Tribunal.45

Another parallel with establishment accounts of the former Yugoslavia (and of Srebrenica specifically) is the belief that the U.S. and U.K. governments were guilty of inaction in Rwanda, when a military intervention to protect the Tutsi was in order. But these governments never just stood idly by. Instead, they actively stood by Kagame, shielding his 1990 aggression from international action, vastly expanding his RPF into the armed forces that overthrew the Habyarimana government and conquered the Rwandan state, and preventing the ICTR from bringing any indictments against Kagame's RPF, even firing ICTR chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte in 2003 to terminate her "Special Investigations" of the RPF.46 The United States even used the Security Council to reduce UN forces in Rwanda as the killings escalated in April 1994, in accord with Kagame's desire for unimpeded war-making and his plans for conquest. But the Guardian swallowed the big lie of U.S. and U.K. inaction from the very beginning. "The world said it should never happen again but stood by while genocide took place in Rwanda," David Beresford wrote. "Despite being fully aware of the horrors through television coverage, most countries stood by and allowed the slaughter to happen," Guardian editor Joseph Harker added.47 Here again, journalistic nonfeasance has been crucial to protecting both the Kagame regime and U.S. and U.K. support for it.

A central feature of the establishment party-line holds that the victims of the 1994 mass killing were largely Tutsi and "moderate" Hutu, targeted for elimination by Hutu extremists. "Rwanda's civil war saw 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered by the Hutus," a G2 headline proclaimed over a report by Chris McGreal.48 This is not based on serious evidence and is incompatible with the fact that Kagame's RPF quickly overpowered their Hutu rivals, were soon killing 10,000 Hutu civilians a month to clear the ground for Tutsi resettlement,49 and drove a huge mass of Hutu refugees into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where many more were killed in the years ahead. Christian Davenport's and Allan Stam's research found that a "majority of the victims of 1994" were in fact Hutu,50 and census and survivor data also point to majority Hutu deaths.51

A true picture of the Rwandan genocide would not only acknowledge the predominance of Hutu deaths in 1994, it would recognize that the same pattern of RPF-triggered deaths and displacements stretches from the RPF's invasion of Rwanda in 1990, straight through its major offensive of February-March 1993, its final offensive and seizure of state power in 1994 (Genocide One), and its series of offensives into the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo from 1994 on, resulting in a death toll several times the scale of Rwanda, and creating the greatest theater of atrocities in the contemporary world (Genocide Two).52 But for the past 17 years, no such picture has emerged on the pages of the Guardian-Observer, which continues to toe the party-line in the summer of 2011 on both Yugoslav and Rwandan history.