Sunday, November 11, 2012

Counterpunch and the "secret" history of the Obama Presidency

The excellent radical political magazine Counterpunch is full of informative and insightful articles about the secret and untold history of the newly elected Obama administration.

Dave Lindorff describes the Obama administration's role in the orchestration of  the crackdown on the US Occupy movement. Lindoff's article, which is based on documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests, show that the Obama White House, the US Government and Government agencies used national security agencies, intelligence and spying networks and Police agencies to crackdown on ordinary citizens involved in the US occupy Protests.

What the documents show is that the Obama White House used the guise of "anti-terrorism" to investigate, monitor and crackdown on groups and individuals involved in Occupy protests across the country and then attempted to conceal and cover up their involvement.

In a piece titled Is this Child Dead Enough for You  journalist and writer Chris Floyd uses the murder of another Pakistani child in a US drone attack ordered by President Obama to ask unsettling questions about the doctrine of "lesser evilism" used by many progressives and liberals  to explain their support for Obama over Mitt Romney in the recent Presidential elections.  Floyd's articles can be read on his website Empire Burlesque.

Writing about the evil of a President ordering drone attacks that kill Pakistani children Chris Floyd writes:
" the sense of triumph and exultation and glee on the part of so many progressives and liberals and ‘dissidents’ at the victory of this “lesser evil.” Where did the reluctance, the nose-holding, the sad head-shaking go? Should they not be mourning the fact that evil has triumphed in America, even if, by their lights, it is a “lesser” evil?

If you really believed that Obama was a lesser evil , if you really did find the drone wars and the White House death squads and Wall Street bailouts and absolution for torturers and all the rest to be shameful and criminal, how can you be happy that all of this will continue? Happy — and continuing to scorn anyone who opposed the perpetuation of this system.

The triumph of a lesser evil is still a victory for evil.
Of the Pakistani drone attacks Floyd writes:
As we all know, these drone missiles are, like the president who wields them, super-smart, a triumph of technology and technocratic expertise. We know, for the president and his aides have repeatedly told us, that these weapons  strike nothing but their intended targets and kill no one but “bad guys.” Indeed, the president’s top aides have testified under oath that not a single innocent person has been among the thousands of Pakistani civilians — that is, civilians of a sovereign nation that is not at war with the United States — who have been killed by the drone missile campaign of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Yet somehow, by some miracle, the missile that roared into the residential area where Naeemullah lived did not confine itself neatly to the house it struck. Somehow, inexplicably, the hunk of metal and wire and computer processors failed — in this one instance — to look into the souls of all the people in the village and ascertain, by magic, which ones were “bad guys” and then kill only them. Somehow — perhaps the missile had been infected with Romney cooties? — this supercharged hunk of high explosives simply, well, exploded with tremendous destructive power when it struck the residential area, blowing the neighborhood to smithereens.

As Wired reports, shrapnel and debris went flying through the walls of Naeemullah’s house and ripped through his small body. When the attack was over — when the buzzing drone sent with Augustinian wisdom by the Peace Laureate was no longer lurking over the village, shadowing the lives of every defenseless inhabitant with the terrorist threat of imminent death, Naeemullah was taken to the hospital in a nearby town.

This is where the picture of above was taken by Noor Behram, a resident of North Waziristan who has been chronicling the effects of the Peace Laureate’s drone war.  When the picture was taken, Naeemullah was dying. He died an hour later"

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