Drones and Special Forces Invite Payback: Time for a Return to Sanity and Peace

By Dave Lindorff

The attacks and attempted attacks this week on Israeli embassy personnel in Georgia, India and Thailand should serve as a serious warning to the people of both Israel and the US that there will be an increasingly heavy price to pay for the kind of government-sponsored terror that both countries have long practiced, and that too many Americans and Israelis have mindlessly cheered on.

The technology of terror has become so wide-spread, and the materials needed to construct magnetically-attached  car bombs, cell-phone detonators, armor-piercing IEDs, diesel/fertilizer bombs and the like, so accessable at consumer shops, hardware stores and local junkyards, that any government, and even any relatively savvy non-government group, can assemble and employ them.

What this means is that when a country like Israel decides to mount a covert campaign of assassination of scientists in a country like Iran, either by using its own agents, or by buying the help of an in-country terror organization like the MEK, it has to expect that the target country will turn around and do the same kind of thing back. There’s no stopping such a tit-for-tat campaign of slaughter, and in fact, it’s more likely that such covert actions will escalate than that they will subside.

The US had better quickly realize that the same thing applies here.  There is an attitude currently in Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and the US intelligence services, that the US can act with impunity when it engages in “secret” wars, and even that such secret wars are a cheap alternative to the massive wars like those against Iraq and Afghanistan, which have not gone well for the US, truth be told. 

After all, this argument goes, the US has the world’s most advanced high-tech killing machines in the form of aerial drones that can fire high-explosive-tipped Hellfire rockets that kill at a distance. It has deadly Special Forces operatives who, with the help of “stealth” aircraft, can conduct assassinations that, when all goes as planned, can eliminate perceived enemies without leaving a trace, or that can kidnap and “render” to secret prisons persons whom the government wants to “disappear” or torture for information.

But it’s only a matter of time before those tactics start to get used against US targets by America’s increasingly long list of enemies...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1064