That’s murder.
Weighing in on targeted drone strikes, journalist Jeremy Scahill did not mince his words. From the video:
If you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded clusterbombs and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do - the women and children that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen -those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area. There’s only one person that’s been identified that had any connection to Al Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S. tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It’s murder - it’s mass murder—when you say, ‘We are going to bomb this area’ because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are there. I’m sorry, that’s murder.
Later on Scahill faced massively negative responses from Obama-supporters on which Roqayah Chamseddine of Frustrated Arab accurately commented:
The response to Scahill has been overwhelmingly negative, from both political camps – Democrats and Republicans; though reactions stemming from Obama supporters are the most venomous, as they unashamedly mirror Bush-era idolatry, going as far as to consider Scahill’s undaunted commentary a sort of political sacrilege.
It’s depressing how true this is.
(via mehreenkasana)
(via alyshabee)
