Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart
of America's Military Strategy in the Muslim World
Greatly expanded U.S. military
Special Ops teams, U.S. drone strikes and private espionage networks run by
former CIA assassins create a threat to our security
The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that that mass U.S.
assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of
America's military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and
never seriously debated by Congress or the American people. Conducting
assassination operations throughout the 1.3 billon-strong Muslim world will
inevitably increase the murder of civilians and thus create exponentially
more "enemies," as Gen. McChrystal suggests -- posing a major long-term
threat to U.S. national security. This mass assassination program, sold as
defending Americans, is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for
it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical
advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead
to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come. General
Petraeus must be replaced, and the U.S. military's policy of direct and mass
assassination of Muslims ended.
The U.S. has conducted assassination programs in the Third World for
decades, but the actual killing -- though directed and financed by the
C.I.A. -- has been largely left to local paramilitary and police forces.
This has now has changed dramatically.
What is unprecedented today is the vast number of Americans directly
assassinating Muslims -- through greatly expanded U.S. military Special
Operations teams, U.S. drone strikes and private espionage networks run by
former CIA assassins and torturers. Most significant is the expanding
geographic scope of their killing. While CENTCOM Commander from October 2008
until July 2010, General Petraeus received secret and unprecedented
permission to unilaterally engage in operations in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Pakistan, Iran, former Russian Republics, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia,
Kenya, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else he deems necessary.
Never before has a nation unleashed so many assassins in so many foreign
nations around the world (9,000 Special Operations soldiers are based in
Iraq and Afghanistan alone) as well as implemented a policy that can be best
described as unprecedented, remote-control, large-scale "mechanized
assassination." As the N.Y. Times noted in December 2009: "For the first
time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out
a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the
United States is not officially at war."
This combination of human and technological murder amounts to a worldwide
"Assassination Inc." that is unique in human affairs. . . .
[ . . . the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime
has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are
considered a "threat." "Threat" was not defined and, thus, a death sentence
would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.
the next stage is to criminalize dissent and criticism of the government.
The May 2010 National Security Strategy states: "We are now moving beyond
traditional distinctions between homeland and national security. . . . This
includes a determination to prevent terrorist attacks against the American
people by fully coordinating the actions that we take abroad with the
actions and precautions that we take at home."--Paul Craig Roberts, "Death of the
First Amendment: The Nazification of the United States,"
counterpunch.org, August 27, 2010]
[ . . . just now Christian armies are busily annexing and wrecking
Afghanistan and Iraq, having recently bombed Somalia? That they use robotic
aircraft to murder Yemenis, that they hunt down Moslems in the Philippines
(where after 1898 Americans engaged in atrocities that would win the
admiration of the Japanese), encourage Israel to ruin Lebanon and to run a
concentration camp for Moslems in Gaza, enthusiastically murder Pakistanis
from the sky, and threaten Syria and Iran?
Those Moslems. Militant, they are. The bastards.
The Islamic countries listed above are only those currently attacked by
America. Let us look at the matter in another way. I append here a list of
all Christian countries conquered by militant Moslems since 1529:
Next, a partial list of Moslem countries conquered by Christians: Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan,
Iraq (the first time), Iraq (again), Iran, Pakistan, East Pakistan,
Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Dubai.--Fred Reed,
"A
Requiem for Reason," fredoneverything.net, September 8, 2010]
[The US Central Intelligence Agency is running and paying for a secret
3,000-strong army of Afghan paramilitaries whose main aim is assassinating
Taliban and al-Qa'ida operatives not just in Afghanistan but across the
border in neighbouring Pakistan's tribal areas, according to Bob Woodward's
explosive book.--Julius Cavendish, "How the CIA ran a secret army of
3,000 assassins," Independent, September 23, 2010]
[During the Vietnam War, CIA created mercenary forces of Hmong and Meo
mountain tribesmen (Operation Hotfoot) and ethnic Chinese Nungs to hunt and
kill Vietcong cadres.
They formed part of CIA's notorious Phoenix Operation that reportedly
assassinated some 26,000 Communist cadres and sympathizers. The head of this
operation, William Colby, went on to become CIA director.
CIA mercenaries were also used during the 1980's in Nicaragua and El
Salvador's brutal conflict between rightists and Marxist rebels. El
Salvador's ruthless death squads were highly effective in liquidating
leftists, as I saw while covering these conflicts
The model of El Salvador's death squads was transposed to Iraq, where
mercenaries, criminals and renegades were used to liquidate Sunni resistance
groups.--Eric Margolis, "Dodge City
Meets Pakistan," lewrockwell.com, September 28, 2010]
[The self-serving claims of the Justice Department's briefwriters
notwithstanding, the basis for the president's claim of legal authority
cannot itself be a secret. . . .
When the executive claims the power to take the life of a citizen without
recourse to law and legal process, and seeks to sustain that under vague
claims of commander-in-chief authority, that claim is in its essence
tyrannical.--Scott Horton, "The President's
Power to Order the Extra-Judicial Execution of an American Citizen,"
Harpers, October 1, 2010]
[This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of
terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers
in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th
Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.
The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because
most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully
confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public
debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about
well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.--Peter Dale Scott and Robert
Parry, "A Long
History of America's Dark Side," consortiumnews.com, October 7, 2010]
[Ahmadinejad blames almost every national setback on the same culprits, but
in this case there were no snorts of derision from the security analysts and
intelligence experts in the west, but rather murmurs of assent.--Julian
Borger and Saeed Kamali Dehghan, "Covert war against Iran's nuclear aims takes chilling
turn," Guardian, December 5, 2010]
[Private military and security companies (PMSC) are the modern reincarnation
of a long lineage of private providers of physical force: corsairs,
privateers and mercenaries. Mercenaries, which had practically disappeared
during the 19th and 20th centuries, reappeared in the 1960s during the
decolonization period, operating mainly in Africa and Asia. Under the United
Nations, a convention was adopted which outlaws and criminalizes their
activities.--Jose L. Gomez del Prado, "Beyond WikiLeaks: The Privatization of War,"
truth-out.org, December 26, 2010]
[It began in the late 1970s, when the Washington-based software developer
Inslaw pioneered people-tracking technology, designed to be used by
prosecutors to monitor case records. Known as the Prosecutor's Management
Information System (PROMIS), the software was developed under grants from
the US department of justice. The US government, as it helped fund the
creation of PROMIS, had been licensed to use the software on condition that
it did not modify, distribute or create derivative versions of it. The
government, however, did not stick to this agreement.--Ryan Gallagher, "Dirtier than Watergate: The Reagan-era espionage
system that has managed to stay under the radar," newstatesman.com,
April 20, 2011]
[Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu's Aden Adde International Airport is
a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. . . .
The CIA presence in Mogadishu is part of Washington's intensifying
counterterrorism focus on Somalia, which includes targeted strikes by US
Special Operations forces, drone attacks and expanded surveillance
operations.--Jeremy Scahill, "The
CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia," Nation, July 12, 2011]
Conn Hallinan, "Shadow
Warriors," counterpunch.org, August 18, 2011
[And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that
the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. "The
move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine
Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. "It seems to have marked
the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service
to private enterprise."--Conor Friedersdorf, "The
Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit,"
theatlantic.com, July 18, 2012]
[While SEAL Team 6 has received extensive coverage, what could be considered the
military story of the twenty-first century, the massive, ongoing expansion of a secret
force (functionally the president's private army) cocooned inside the U.S. military -
now at almost 70,000 personnel and growing - has gotten next to none.--Nick Turse, "A Secret War in 135 Countries,"
tomdispatch.com, September 24, 2015]
[The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001 in
Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under Obama, with an
actual White House "kill list," the use of drones has again expanded, this time
nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as
well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones.--Rebecca Gordon, "An Illegal
Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance," truthdig.com, July 18, 2016]