Saturday, June 09, 2012
Bruce Wilder 06.08.12 at 9:39 pm
It might seem a bit tangential to the drone strike issue, but the way charges under the law of war are laid against some of those captured and labeled as Al Qaeda operatives, back before we just blew them up from afar, seem to me to be indicative and revealing of the debasement of reasoning entailed.
The Wikipedia article on Omar Khadr reports that he was charged with murder, for his participation in a firefight against U.S. forces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
It is quite the twisted logic, which says “its a war” but the “lawful targets” do not have the right to fight back.
Of course, now we have technology that seems for the moment at least to take away the target’s practical ability to fight back, as well as relieving our forces from any risk of the awkward questions that might arise, when they capture, say, a teenage boy. Now, we just murder the teenage boy, and deny that he was the target; he was collateral damage, but not collateral damage, because he was killed and Obama defines all males of military age, who are killed, as “militants”, ex post, all without the embarrassment of judicial proceedings of any kind.
It is kind of marvelous, in its way.
It might seem a bit tangential to the drone strike issue, but the way charges under the law of war are laid against some of those captured and labeled as Al Qaeda operatives, back before we just blew them up from afar, seem to me to be indicative and revealing of the debasement of reasoning entailed.
The Wikipedia article on Omar Khadr reports that he was charged with murder, for his participation in a firefight against U.S. forces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
It is quite the twisted logic, which says “its a war” but the “lawful targets” do not have the right to fight back.
Of course, now we have technology that seems for the moment at least to take away the target’s practical ability to fight back, as well as relieving our forces from any risk of the awkward questions that might arise, when they capture, say, a teenage boy. Now, we just murder the teenage boy, and deny that he was the target; he was collateral damage, but not collateral damage, because he was killed and Obama defines all males of military age, who are killed, as “militants”, ex post, all without the embarrassment of judicial proceedings of any kind.
It is kind of marvelous, in its way.
# posted by Frank @ 1:20 AM 
