By Chris Floyd
Here’s what they are saying about America’s Terror Warriors in the UK’s arch-conservative Daily Telegraph:
And yet there has been very little protest, certainly compared to the storm of international criticism that greeted the decision to hold suspected terrorists at Guantanamo – a policy that didn’t kill anyone, let alone any innocent women and children. The silence from human rights groups over the drone attacks is deafening. What has persuaded them that it is acceptable to kill people, including people who are not terrorists, but that it is inhumane to deprive them of a good night’s sleep?
…The fact that targeted killing has been deemed ‘legal’ seems to have had the effect of making many people, including the President, think that it is morally justified. But that conclusion doesn’t follow. There are plenty of things that are legal, but which you would not be morally justified in doing — just as there are times when you are morally justified in doing things that are illegal.
Perhaps using drones to kill terrorists is a legitimate way of prosecuting the war against al- Qaeda and the Taliban. It may be that the women and children who get killed as a result don’t matter — although I would like to hear someone from the US government, or a human rights organisation, explain exactly why. But we — and the Americans — are deceiving ourselves if we think that something is OK just because international lawyers say it is.
Arthur Silber has written repeatedly, and with furious eloquence on this theme for many years. (See here, here, and here, among many others. And follow the links.) We direct to just two of his painfully apt pronouncements:
That is what Andrew Meyer did in Florida. He broke the goddamned rules [by asking Senator John Kerry a question about impeaching George W. Bush for war crimes and stopping another war. For more, see this powerful series by Silber.] He did not do so in any way that merited his being arrested — but HE BROKE THE RULES. This cannot be permitted, not if our meaningless, pointless national discussion devoid of all substance is to continue in its meaningless, pointless way. Breaking the rules cannot be allowed if the lies are to continue. So he was arrested.
And he was charged with a third-degree felony for resisting arrest with violence and a second-degree misdemeanor for disturbing the peace — for asking the most urgent question of our time, the question that almost no one will ask. He was charged with resisting an arrest that should never have occurred — and with "disturbing the peace."
Friends, if this country — and if you individually — are to have any kind of human future at all, and by "human," I mean a life with any genuine meaning and joy, a life not fatally compromised by ongoing murder, torture, and brutality — you had better fucking disturb the peace every second of every day.
You couldn’t say it better, and I won’t even try.
I always knew the laws of men were useless, now I have that proof.