War Machine continues to eat our young while pundits spin, politicians promise, profiteers plunder and comedians do the wave!

I am not the author of this piece but it says it all for me.

It explains why I ran.

For every peace activist this should be required reading. Share widely

QUOTE: David Kilcullen is a counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and now
advises the State Department. He has shown that two per cent of the people
killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis. The remaining 98 per
cent are as innocent as the victims of 9/11. He says: "It's not moral."... Journalist Johan Hari writes: "some
people within the CIA admit how arbitrary their choice of targets is. One
of their senior figures told The New Yorker: "Sometimes you're dealing with
tribal chiefs. Often they say an enemy of theirs is al-Qa'ida because they
want to get rid of somebody, or they made crap up because they wanted to
prove they were valuable so they could make money."...The Predators and Reapers are being
sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the support of other Western governments,
and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone – 14 times the
number killed in the 7/7 attacks in London. The floods were seen as an
opportunity to increase the attacks, and last month saw the largest number
of robot-plane bombings ever: 22. Over the next decade, spending on drones
is set to increase by 700 per cent.

Obama's Finest Hour: Killing Innocent People For "Made-Up Crap"

Written by Chris Floyd Monday, 18 October 2010 17:03

If ever I am tempted by the siren songs of my tribal past as a deep-fried,
yellow-dawg Democrat, and begin to feel any faint, atavistic stirrings of
sympathy for the old gang, I simply think of things like the scenario
below, sketched last week by Johann Hari, and those wispy ghosts of
partisanship past go howling back to the depths:

Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over your house and
blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a
joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you.
It blows up all the houses in your street, and so barbecues your family and
your neighbours until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred
slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the robot-planes
belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is
because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know?
Somebody told them. Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against
the robot.

Now imagine it doesn't end there: these attacks are happening every
week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners
and children. The number of robot-planes in the sky is increasing every
week. You discover they are named "Predators", or "Reapers" – after the
Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it
clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop.
What do you do? If there was a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil
nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to
listen?

...[This] is in fact an accurate description of life in much of
Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators and Reapers are being
sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the support of other Western governments,
and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone – 14 times the
number killed in the 7/7 attacks in London. The floods were seen as an
opportunity to increase the attacks, and last month saw the largest number
of robot-plane bombings ever: 22. Over the next decade, spending on drones
is set to increase by 700 per cent.

Friends, it's very simple: if you support Barack Obama and the Democrats --
even if reluctantly, even if you're just being all sophisticatedly
super-savvy and blogospherically strategic about it, playing the "long
game" or eleven-dimensional chess or what have you -- you are supporting
the outright murder of innocent people who have never done anything against
you or yours. You have walked into a house, battered down the bedroom door,
put the barrel of a gun against the temple of a sleeping child, and pulled
the trigger. That is what you are supporting, that is what you are
complicit in, that is what you yourself are doing.

But hey, let's be all super-savvy and eleventh-dimensional ourselves here
for a moment. Let's be pragmatic, and technocratic, let's be grown-ups,
let's not get sidetracked by a bunch of jejune, dorm-room, hippy-dippy
moralizing. No, let's concentrate on practicalities, let's get down to
brass tacks, let's be serious and focus on "what works" to protect our
national security. OK, so here's the practical result of the illegal
campaign of mass murder that Obama is waging on the sovereign territory of
one of America's allies:

... Drone technology was developed by the Israelis, who routinely use
it to bomb the Gaza Strip. I've been in Gaza during some of these attacks.
The people there were terrified – and radicalised. A young woman I know
who had been averse to political violence and an advocate of peaceful
protest saw a drone blow up a car full of people – and she started
supporting Islamic Jihad and crying for the worst possible revenge against
Israel. Robot-drones have successfully bombed much of Gaza, from secular
Fatah to Islamist Hamas, to the brink of jihad.

Is the same thing happening in Pakistan? David Kilcullen is a
counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and now
advises the State Department. He has shown that two per cent of the people
killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis. The remaining 98 per
cent are as innocent as the victims of 9/11. He says: "It's not moral." And
it gets worse: "Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an
alienated family, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown
exponentially as drone strikes have increased. ... It could be poised to
get even worse: Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars says the US has an immediate
plan to bomb 150 targets in Pakistan if there is a jihadi attack inside
America.

Why, it's almost as if the drone campaign was designed to create more and
more enemies -- and more and more contracts for war profiteers to build
more and more drones, which can then be used to create more and more
enemies, which means more and more contracts for ..... say, it is a
practical plan, after all! A practical plan to create terrorism, not quell
it.

And what is the "evidence" used by the Administration militarists as they
draw up their target lists for the defenseless villages in Pakistan? What
is the "intelligence" produced by the $75 billion lavished on our 200,000
security apparatchiks every year? On what basis is Barack Obama killing
people in Pakistan? Hari reports:

..[The] press releases uncritically repeated by the press after a
bombing always brag about "senior al-Qa'ida commanders" killed – but some
people within the CIA admit how arbitrary their choice of targets is. One
of their senior figures told The New Yorker: "Sometimes you're dealing with
tribal chiefs. Often they say an enemy of theirs is al-Qa'ida because they
want to get rid of somebody, or they made crap up because they wanted to
prove they were valuable so they could make money."

That's right: Barack Obama is killing hundreds of innocent civilians in
Pakistan on the basis of crap made up for money. Made-up crap. For money.
That's why a child who is just as precious as your child is to a parent who
is just as real a person as you are was killed this week, by Barack Obama
and the Democratic Party and the entire bipartisan foreign policy
establishment of the United States of America: crap made up for money.

And of course, it's not just tribal chiefs making up crap for blood money:
the entire aforementioned bipartisan foreign policy establishment is now
and has for years been making up crap "so they could make money" -- for
themselves, for their corporate patrons, for their government agencies, for
their defense and "security" stockholdings, for the perpetuation of their
bloated, belligerent, pig-ignorant domination of world affairs and American
society -- by killing innocent people all over the world.

"But oh my gosh, oh my lord, we have to support Obama! What if those Tea
Party Republicans get into power? What would happen then?" What would
happen? The same goddamned thing that's happening right now, that's what.
More and more war, more and more murder, more and more domination by a
militarist kleptocracy. As Glenn Greenwald notes this week, Obama and the
Tea Partiers (and the neocons, and the liberal hawks, and the Bush Regime
war criminals) are in lockstep (even goosestep) on keeping the War Machine
stoked and rolling.

That's why the opposition to the Tea Party Republicans has been so anemic,
focused almost entirely on personality flaws or asinine comments or resume
padding or stupid things they did in college. The Democrats can't possibly
attack them on substance -- i.e., the fact that the Tea Partiers are rabid
warmongers who delight in murder, torture and repression and believe that
the poor, the sick, the old, the weak, the unlucky, and the vulnerable
should just eat shit and die already -- because these are the same
positions the Democrats hold! Who "reformed" health care into a gargantuan,
guaranteed boondoggle for rapacious conglomerates? Who bailed out the
bankers and left millions in the hands of savage "robo-signers?" Who set up
the "Catfood Commission" and stocked it from top to bottom with long-time,
deep-dyed haters of the poor and the weak? It wasn't Dick Cheney, bub.

I don't want to see the Tea Partiers in power. But I'm not going to support
one faction of murderers and plunderers just to keep out another faction of
murderers and plunderers. Hari makes this good analogy about the drone
program:

Yet many people defend the drones by saying: "We have to do something."
If your friend suffered terrible third-degree burns, would you urge her to
set fire to her hair because "you have to do something"? Would you give a
poisoning victim another, worse poison, on the grounds that any action is
better than none?

Similarly, I say: would you support one murderer -- who likes to break into
children's bedrooms and blow their brains out -- in order to stop another
murderer, who would do the same thing, from taking over a vicious gang of
murderers? What would be the basis, the reason for your support? That the
first murderer wears nicer suits? Digs cooler music? Throws better street
parties? Leaves a pretty little flower next to the blown-out brains?

For a system sunk so deeply in evil, there is no "lesser" evil to choose.
The militarist kleptocracy itself is evil, and every political faction that
does not denounce it and seek to dismantle it is complicit in this evil.
The choice is to stand outside such factions; the choice is non-cooperation
with evil, as advocated by Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, King. I'm not going to
spend my brief time here on earth standing with blood-soaked killers, no
matter what factional name they give themselves, or what loyalties they
might claim on our myth-clouded memories of the past. I'm not going to
teach my children that all we can do is to grovel before one
child-murdering maniac or another, to keep quiet, to never speak the truth,
to sell their votes, their dignity and their souls to murderers who would
pervert every good instinct -- and every bad instinct -- every worthy hope
and every nasty fear, to keep themselves in power.

Dead children. Made-up crap. For money. That's what our leading
"dissidents" want us to support. There is much that could be said about the
utterly puerile arguments being offered for this murder-abetting stance;
but in the interests of brevity, and civility -- and my own sanity -- I
will forbear, and simply say: no thanks.