MY WISH LIST FOR SECOND TERM OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

What I wish for during President Barack Obama's second term:

1.     a push to make a pathway to citizenship for all the undocumented immigrants in the United States.

2.    an end to extra-judicial killings via American drones.

3.    support for the Palestinians effort to obtain statehood and membership in the United Nations.

4.     an expansion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to include a "single payor" system, where the government offers health insurance to all in return for paying income taxes.

5.    an end to animosity to Iran.  The United States should not have any "enemies."  This includes Iran.

UN INVESTIGATOR SAYS U.S. DRONE ATTACKS VIOLATE INTERNATIONAL LAW

The Guardian has an article today about how U.N. investigators believe that drone attacks make shambles of international law.  This of course assumes that international law is real and not a fiction.

Owen Bowcott writes:



"The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.

"Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards."

The drone attacks subject Obama (and the war monger Panetta) to charges of war crimes.

Writes Bowcott:

"In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes". His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)."

OBAMA ORDERS INCREASE IN U.S. DRONE ATTACKS IN PAKISTAN

Should the U.S. under Barack Obama be sending drones flying over Pakistan and firing missiles at Taliban leaders, and, in the process, killing their families as well? I argue, no. These are extra-judicial killings of people only suspected to be enemy combatants. Whether they are or not should first be determined in a court of law. Who knows how many innocent men, women and children have been incinerated by U.S. attacks from the sky?

And, furthermore, what gives the U.S. the right to kill members of the Taliban? Yes, they are backward, illiterate and often fanatical. But does this warrant their execution and destruction by U.S. attack drones?

Scott Shane reports in today's The New York Times that Obama has ordered an increase in these drone attacks:

"The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 U.S. more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide."

I argue that these drone attacks will create 10 more enemies of the U.S. for each member of the Taliban killed. And 100 more for each innocent man, woman and child killed by mistake.

Americans claim their land is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Yet the American use of lethal drones tells the whole world that the U.S. is also a military killer that causes death and destruction in poor Pakistani villages.

U.S. UNDER OBAMA ALLOWS DRONE MISSILE STRIKES AGAINST RURAL VILLAGERS IN PAKISTAN

I call upon Pres. Barack Obama to halt all drone missile attacks against Pakistani villagers. Today, BBC reports that the U.S. fired another missile killing nine people.

Reports the BBC:

"At least nine people have been killed in an airstrike on suspected militant targets in Pakistan's tribal region of South Waziristan, local officials say.

"Pilotless US drone aircraft are thought to have carried out the attack in which missiles were fired at a house near the town of Wana on the Afghan border."

Obama is wrong if he thinks that firing missiles at Pakistani insurgents or at Taliban members is going to "win hearts and minds" of ordinary Paksitanis.

If I was a Pakistani, I would be outraged at the intrusion of foreign drones from the United States attacking villages in my sovereign Pakistan. I don't care how pure the American motives against "terrorists," I would totally resist the violation of my country's national territory.

Obama and Gates say that they will attack Al Qaeda whereever it exists. This too is foolhardy and unworthy of Barack Obama. Al Qaeda is not some living monster. It consists of farmers, teenagers, villagers, who are consumed with religious fundamentalism that thinks it is doing God's will to attack the West. There is no way that Obama's missiles are going to defeat unsophisticated and poorly educated religious fundamentalists.

I say, stop this killing of ordinary rural Pakistanis from the sky by the Americans.

STOP AIRBORNE MISSILE RAIDS AGAINST PAKISTANIS

I heard Pres. Barack Obama speaking to the Notre Dame commencement today, thanks to C-SPAN. Obama's speech was riveting as usual. Among other things, he mentioned former ND president Ted Hesburgh's commitment to abolishing the death penalty and his campaign to abolish nuclear weapons.

But what I don't understand is how Obama can dish out the inspiring words on one hand, but on the other, still continue the target assassinations by drone missiles of Taliban insurgents in Pakistan.

Today The New York Times runs an op-ed by David Kilcullen and Andrew Mc Donald Exum on the counter-productive results arising from those missile strikes.

Write Exum and Kilcullen:

"The appeal of drone attacks for policy makers is clear. For one thing, their effects are measurable. Military commanders and intelligence officials point out that drone attacks have disrupted terrorist networks in Pakistan, killing key leaders and hampering operations. Drone attacks create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers. And, because they kill remotely, drone strikes avoid American casualties."

But the drone attacks do more harm to U.S. interests than they benefit, according to Kilcullen and Exum.

First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy.

"While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants.

"Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent — hardly “precision.” American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan. Nevertheless, every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased."

In other words, use of bombs or missiles fired from manned or unmanned aircraft creates a sense of outrage and a desire for revenge against the United States and against all Americans. How Obama can approve the continuation of these raids when he believes that every human being deserves respect and civility is beyond comprehension.

Furthermore Kilcullen and Exum give two other reasons why the missile strikes should stop:

"Second, public outrage at the strikes is hardly limited to the region in which they take place — areas of northwestern Pakistan where ethnic Pashtuns predominate. Rather, the strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.

"Third, the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic — or, more accurately, a piece of technology — substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective."

I call upon President Obama and the United States government to ban these airborne missile strikes on Pakistani villages. If I were a Pakistani, I would detest any entity, person or government that inflicted this horror from the skies upon my family, my relatives, my village and my country.

KILLING PAKISTANIS BY U.S. DRONE MISSILES AS REPREHENSIBLE AS AMERICAN TORTURE OF AL QAEDA SUSPECTS

There is a report today about still another U.S. missile strike into some Pakistani village in South Waziristan. This is terror inflicted from the sky. Besides it is rough justice. No court, no judge, no jury has declared that these people must die at American hands. Barack Obama should call an immediate halt to these executions.

I have been writing about U.S. missile attacks fired from unmanned drones prowling overn backward agrarian villages in western Pakistan. How many lives have been lost, men, women, children, all at the whim of some CIA agent sitting somewhere in some secret CIA office in Phoenix and pushing the fire button on his computer console controlling the lethal drone?

Today, in The New York Times Week in Review, Scott Shane asks what is the difference between the morality of these drone attacks and the torture authorized by Bush and Cheney on Al Qaeda suspects.

Writes Shane:

"WHEN the Central Intelligence Agency obliterates a dozen suspected terrorists, along with assorted family members, with a missile from a drone, the news rarely stirs a strong reaction far beyond Pakistan.

"Yet the waterboarding of three operatives from Al Qaeda — one of them the admitted murderer of 3,000 people as organizer of the 9/11 attacks — has stirred years of recriminations, calls for prosecution and national soul-searching.

"What is it about the terrible intimacy of torture that so disturbs and captivates the public? Why has torture long been singled out for special condemnation in the law of war, when war brings death and suffering on a scale that dwarfs the torture chamber?"

Shane does not seem to anwwer to his own question, satisfied to just present it. But
the answer is clear for me: both are equally immoral and reprehensible.

STOP DRONE MISSILES KILLING DOZENS OF VILLAGERS IN WAZIRISTAN

Who is the person in the Obama administration who thinks firing missiles into Pakistani villages and killing dozens of men, women and children is effective? Oh, because they are Taliban and Al Qaeda types? It seems to me that everyone in poor Pakistani villages in Waziristan is an "Al Qaeda type." And many certainly are Taliban because they live in a backward uneducated society that has embraced Islamic fundamentalism.

But that does not mean the United States should kill them. And under what rule of law under international law does the U.S. have the right to enter another country's territory and fire missiles from unmanned drones at people's homes?

No matter how many Talibani Americans kill by these missile raids, others will take their place, probably in the ratio of 100 recruits for each person killed. This American program is doomed to utter failure Obama thinks it will decimate the Talibani or the "Al Qaeda types."

Have I mentioned the hatred and animus that these drones are stoking in the hearts of all Pakistanis? No wonder the leader of the Pakistani Taliban warns that his fellow believers will somehow mount an attack on Washington D.C.

Pamela Constable reports for The Washington Post:

"Baitullah Mehsud, an Islamist leader from the South Waziristan tribal area in northwest Pakistan, called several international news agencies in Pakistan to assert responsibility for the armed occupation of the police training compound that ended with 11 people dead.

"He also told reporters that he was planning to attack targets in the U.S. capital in retaliation for more than 30 strikes by unmanned U.S. aircraft that have targeted suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries in northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan.

""Soon we will launch an attack on Washington that will amaze everyone in the world," Mehsud told the Associated Press. In a separate phone conversation, he told Agence France-Presse that his forces had carried out the police academy attack near the city of Lahore as an act of revenge for the U.S. drone raids. "There will be more such attacks," he said."

As I said, this reaction is perfectly understandable. If you were a poor Pakistani farmer in some small village, and your neighbor's house was incinerated by an American missile fired from an unmanned drone and piloted by some CIA type thousands of miles away, and you saw your neighbor's whole family, men, women, children all dead from the attack, what would your reaction be?

STOP FIRING U.S. DRONE MISSILES INTO PAKISTANI VILLAGES

I have called for the United States to stop shooting missiles from drones at Pakistani villages in the Waziristan. Why? Because the missiles kill civilians - women, children, non-combatants, non-jihadists. Furthermore, the U.S. has no business trying to kill jihadists. If anything, Pakistan should arrest those deemed violating the law and give them a fair trial. This is the civilized and fair method of punishing law breakers, not targeting them with a missile shot from an unmanned drone and fired by some CIA guy thousands of miles away.

Sunday's The New York Times carries an article by Mark Mazzetti in Week in Review on this very topic. The upshot is that for U.S. officials, sending armed unmanned drones into Pakistan is the best of many alternatives. I object to the policy.

Mark Mazzetti writes:

"But in Pakistan, some C.I.A. veterans of the tribal battles worry that instead of separating the citizenry from the militants the drone strikes may be uniting them. These experts say they fear that killing militants from the sky won’t undermine, and may promote, the psychology of anti-American militancy that is metastasizing in the country.

"“Unless we come up with a coherent Pakistan policy, then nothing works,” said Milton Bearden, who as C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad once led the agency’s campaign to arm Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet Union."

Imagine having missile-carrying drones flying over your house. What would you think of the country that sends them above your head? Would you fear having a missile blow up your home and family, maybe fired in mistake by some CIA operative who has no idea who you are or where your children sleep or where your elderly parents sit?

The U.S. merely shows its contempt for Pakistani villagers, for human life, and above all for the rights of the individual. Stop the killing of innocent civilians in the quest to kill one Al Qaeda type. Firing these missiles merely tells the world that Americans have no respect for the individual, that they are willing to kill 25, 50 or 100 just to kill some Al Qaeda leader.

Writes Mazzetti:

"Over the last six months, C.I.A. operatives wielding joysticks have launched more than three dozen strikes by Predator and more heavily-armed Reaper drones. Missiles fired from them have hit militants gathering in mountain redoubts, and they have hit truck convoys ferrying ammunition across the border into Afghanistan.

"Some agency veterans draw comparisons to the Israeli policy of “targeted killings” of Hamas leaders — killings that claimed scores of the group’s top operatives in the Palestinian territories, but didn’t keep new recruits from attacking Israel.

"Intelligence officials in Washington and Islamabad said it was nearly impossible to measure the impact of the strikes on the so-called “war of ideas.” Even when precise, the drone strikes often kill women and children in militant compounds. When that happens, local Pashtun customs of “badal” obligate their survivors to seek revenge."

Killing Pakistani villagers by missiles fired from drones will only exacerbate the hatred already felt by Pakistanis towards America. Revenge will be paramount. Having seen their children and family members destroyed by some deadly American missile, Pakistanis in Waziristan will consider any and all options to revenge and redress this cruel U.S. attack from the sky.

SHORT TAKES ON PRESIDENTS' DAY

Several items of importance:

1. JUAN COLE'S POSTING ON SUFFERING OF GAZA'S CHILDREN. If you have not visited or read Juan Cole's Informed Comment, his post today on the plight of children wounded in the Israeli attack on Gaza is a must read. Here is the link.

Cole writes:

"Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ruled out allowing needed goods into Gaza, which Israel has virtually surrounded from land and sea, until Hamas releases captured Israeli soldier Sgt. Gilad Shalit. Olmert is thereby committing a war crime. You can't collectively punish the general Gaza population if you are the occupying authority. It is not allowed to torture that wailing child in the video above by keeping out painkillers, just because some adult somewhere from the same territory captured an Israeli soldier. But Olmert will get a pass on his war crimes. Apparently you only get punished for them if you are weak or lose; it isn't the crime but the power of the criminal that matters."

2. CRASH OF TWO NUCLEAR SUBMARINES IN ATLANTIC. The crash of a British nuclear submarine with a French nuclear submarine someplace in the Atlantic Ocean illustrates why no country should possess a nuclear submarine. There could have been release of hazardous nuclear material into the ocean. For all we know, there might have been, although both France and the U.K. deny any such nuclear leakage. Furthermore, both crews could have been killed. Neither Britain nor France needs a war weapon like a nuclear submarine. No country should possess a nuclear sub, not even the United States.

3. ANOTHER DRONE MISSILE STRIKE IN PAKISTAN. I don't understand how Barack Obama could allow the continuation of these missile strikes in Pakistan's western tribal areas. If the U.S. and Obama think that killing villagers or destroying someone's home is going to win the war against Taliban insurgents, they are mistaken. All these strikes do is to incite hatred for Americans and foment in the minds and hearts of all Pakistanis the urge to take revenge against the U.S.

STOP U.S. MISSILE STRIKES AGAINST PAKISTANI VILLAGERS

Today we receive another report of the U.S. firing missiles from drone aircraft aimed at Taliban and jihadists living in the Wahiristans in the tribal territories in western Pakistan. The latest strike reportedly killed 27 "insurgents."

The BBC reports:

"The missile strike hit a house in the South Waziristan area, near the Afghan border, which officials said was used as a hide-out for Taleban militants.

"The US has carried out more than 20 air strikes from drones in north-western Pakistan in recent months. . .

"Islamabad has long argued that US air strikes complicate its own fight against insurgents, and violate its sovereignty.

Pakistani leaders had expressed hope that the new US administration of Barack Obama would halt the controversial manoeuvres."

When the U.S. government reports death tallies like the one above, the important question is how many of the dead were women and children? And how many were just ordinary Pakistanis just eking out their traditional lives in a remote rustic village?

These U.S. raids do no good, but, in fact, cause much resentment and hatred by Pakistanis universally for the Americans and for the U.S. Pakistan is a proud country, and the Pakistanis are never going to forget how the U.S. violated their territorial integrity by sending in the drones as well as Special Forces. Just as Americans would be outraged if Russia sent its missile-firing drones into U.S. airspace, so Pakistanis feel about the U.S. actions, which, by the way, clearly and totally Pakistani national law.

Obama needs to bring these raids to an end, once and for all. Military might raining from the sky will never make Pakistani villagers allies of America.

OBAMA MUST END U.S. AIR STRIKES AGAINST PAKISTANI VILLAGERS

Barack Obama has done excellent things in his first three full days in office. He has ordered Guantanamo closed, banned torture and harsh interrogation methods that violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and ordered public agencies to release information freely and willingly.

However, one thing that Obama apparently has not done is to stop the firing of missiles from U.S. drones against suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members in Pakistani villages. Two were fired today, killing at least nine people, including a five-year old.

The BBC reports:

"The first drone attack struck a house owned by a man called Khalil Khan in the village of Zeerakai at 1700 local time.

"Four Arab militants were killed in the strikes, officials said. Their identities were not immediately clear but officials said one was a senior al-Qaeda operative.

"The second attack was aimed at the house of a Taleban commander about 10km (six miles) from the town of Wanna, local reports said.

"But officials told the BBC that the drone actually hit the house of a pro-government tribal leader, killing him and four members of his family, including a five-year-old child."

These lethal attacks make no sense for a liberal democratic government as Obama personifies. Liberalism puts a value on each person, on each individual, that says that no matter how lofty the goal or purpose, no one else has a right to take that person's life or do him/her injury.

Each person counts just as much as anyone else. And governments can't fall back on the end justifies the means or on the utilitarian bunk that it is for the good of the greatest number.

Firing missiles from an airplane, manned or unmanned, carries inherent risks that the missiles will kill innocent men, women and children. The death of the five-year old is a good example. Neither Obama or the U.S. government has a license to kill the child or anyone else who happens to be around on the basis that the missile is really aimed for "bad guys."

President Obama, call an end to the firing of missiles into Pakistani villages.

NO MORE U.S. MISSILES INTO PAKISTANI VILLAGES

The BBC reports that a U.S. unmanned drone fired missiles into a house in South Waziristan, killing 20 people.

As I wrote several times before, this illegal U.S. incursion into Pakistan must stop.

First, it is a severe violation of human rights. Each of those 20 people deserved to live and to live in peace and without fear of being blown to bits by an American bomb.

Second. Whoever in the White House thinks that the U.S. has a right to attack an agrarian village in Pakistan has no knowledge or concept of international law. Such an attack violates Pakistan sovereignty and is an insult to all Pakistanis.

Third. A military strike like this one killing ordinary Pakistani peasants does severe damage to the fight against militant Islamism and forever destroys any Pakistani goodwill towards the U.S., at least in the surrounding Pakistan areas. Military action cannot accomplish peace or uproot "terrorism." All it can do is exacerbate ill will between Pakistani Islamists and Americans.

So again I say, ground all U.S. war planes, whether manned or unmanned. Cease firing missiles into Pakistan. Stop the killing of civilians.