The mass murder “drone attacks” and “pointless wars” perpetuated by President Barack Obama have been condemned by the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal as being carried out only to “please Israel.”
Paul Craig Roberts, who was also a columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate and has had many university appointments, made the announcement in a recent article on his own personal blog.
Roberts wrote that “[w]e are now witnessing the expansion of Obama’s Kill List. The list began under the Bush regime as a rationale for murdering suspect citizens of countries with which the US was not at war.
“The Obama regime expanded the scope of the list to include the execution, without due process of law, of US citizens accused, without evidence presented in court, of association with terrorism. The list quickly expanded to include the American teen-age son of a cleric accused of preaching jihad against the West. The son’s ‘association’ with terrorism apparently was his blood relationship to his father.
“As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote, the power of government to imprison and to murder its citizens without due process of law is the certain mark of dictatorship. Dictatorship is government unconstrained by law.
“On February 10 the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama dictatorship now intends to expand the Kill List to include those accused of acting against foreign governments. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an ‘Algerian militant’ accused of planning the January attack on an Algerian natural gas facility, has been chosen as the threat that is being used to expand Obama’s Kill List to include participants in the internal disputes and civil wars of every country.
“If the Obama regime is on the side of the government, as in Algeria, it will kill the rebels opposing the government. If the Obama regime is on the side of the rebels, as in Libya, it will kill the government’s leaders. Whether Washington sends a drone to murder Putin and the president of China remains to be seen. But don’t be surprised if Washington has targeted the president of Iran.
“The elasticity of the Kill List and its easy expansion makes it certain that Washington will be involved in extra-judicial executions of those ‘associated with terrorism’ over much of the world. Americans themselves should be alarmed, because the term “association with terrorism” is very elastic. Federal prosecutors have interpreted the term to include charitable contributions to Palestinians.
“The next time former US Representative Cynthia McKinney gets on an aid ship to Palestine, will Washington give the green light to Israel to kill her as a terrorist agent for her association with aid to Gaza, ruled by the ‘terrorist organization,’ Hamas?
“Already a year or two ago, the director of Homeland Security said that the federal police agency’s focus had shifted from terrorists to ‘domestic extremists,’ another elastic and undefined term. A domestic extremist will be all who disagree with Washington. They also are headed for the Kill List.”
“If we add up all the costs of the ‘war on terror,’ it is obvious that the costs are many magnitudes greater than the terror threat that the war is alleged to contain.
“If terrorists were really a threat to Americans, shopping centers and electric substations would be blowing up constantly.
“Airport security would be a sham, because terrorists would set off the bombs in the crowded lines waiting to clear security.
“Traffic would be continually tied up from roofing nails dispensed on all main roads in cities across the country for each rush hour. Water supplies would be poisoned. Police stations would be bombed and police officers routinely terminated on the streets.
“Instead, nothing has happened despite Washington’s killing and displacement of huge numbers of Muslims in seven or eight countries over the past 11 years.
“The cost of the ‘war on terror’ is not merely the multi-trillion dollar financial bill documented by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. The cost of Washington’s wars is the main reason for the large national debt, the threat of which politicians are using to destroy the social safety net. This is a huge cost for a pointless war that pleases Israel and enriches the armament companies but does nothing for Americans.
“The financial cost is huge, but how important is this cost compared to another cost–the domestic police state supported by a significant percentage of the population and a majority in Congress and the media? Is the war on terror worth the evisceration of the US Constitution? A war that costs us the Constitution means our total defeat.
“The cost in human life has been enormous. Millions of Muslims have been killed, wounded, orphaned, and displaced, and entire countries have been destroyed as socio-political entities.
“Washington locked Iraq in sectarian murder. Libya has no government, just warring factions, and now Syria is in the process of being disintegrated. The prospects for people’s lives in these countries have been ruined for years to come.
“The cost in American lives has also been high. More than 400,000 American lives have been adversely affected by 11 years of pointless war. The deaths of 6,656 US troops, the 50,000 wounded, the 1,700 life-changing limb amputations, and the suicides are just the tip of the iceberg.”
