Reality

Few writers combine literary power and level-headed fury better than than Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque:

In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation.

This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil.

Line up the bodies of the children, the thousands of children - the infants, the toddlers, the schoolkids - whose bodies were torn to pieces, burned alive or riddled with bullets during the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Line them up in the desert sand, walk past them, mile after mile, all those twisted corpses, those scraps of torn flesh and seeping viscera, those blank faces, those staring eyes fixed forever on nothingness.

This is the reality of what happened in Iraq; there is no other reality.

These children - these thousands of children - are dead, and will always be dead, as a direct result of the unprovoked act of military aggression launched and sustained by the American power structure. Killing these children, creating and maintaining the conditions that led to the slaughter of these children, was precisely what the armed forces of the United States were doing in Iraq. Without the invasion, without the occupation, without the 1.5 million members of the American volunteer army who surrendered their moral agency to "just follow orders" and carry out their leaders' agenda of aggression, those children would not have died - would not have been torn, eviscerated, shot, burned and destroyed. ...

And so Barack Obama, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, the self-proclaimed inheritor of the mantle of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, went to North Carolina this week to declare the act of aggression in Iraq "an extraordinary achievement." ...

He did not say a single word - not one - about the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed by this "fulfilled mission," this "extraordinary achievement," this "success." These human beings - these sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, kinfolk, lovers, friends - cannot be acknowledged. They cannot be perceived. It must be as if they had never existed. It must be as if they are not dead now.

The divorce from reality here is beyond description. ...

My other favourite US blogger is Glenn Greenwald, who has two excellent post-Xmas posts: one on Bradley Manning's show-trial and one on Greg Miller's Washington Post report about Barack Obama's murder-by-drone program.

WaPo (my emphasis):

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. ... [N]o president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation's security goals. ...

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss. ...

When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation's clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled. ...

Key members of Obama's national security team came into office more inclined to endorse drone strikes than were their counterparts under Bush, current and former officials said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former CIA director and current Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan seemed always ready to step on the accelerator, said a former official who served in both administrations and was supportive of the program. Current administration officials did not dispute the former official's characterization of the internal dynamics. ...

The only member of Obama's team known to have formally raised objections to the expanding drone campaign is Dennis Blair, who served as director of national intelligence. ... His opinion contributed to his isolation from Obama’s inner circle, and he was fired last year.

Greenwald:

In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (...these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it's a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection ... And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world - particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children - Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration).

By whole-heartedly embracing and extending the inhumane and criminal policies of the Bush/Cheney administration, Obama has effectively cut off all debate and all protest. Democrats who raised hell when Bush did X now refuse to utter one peep when Obama does X. Indeed, they now praise Obama for X, showing that their initial condemnation was not based on principles of person or party, it was pure theater. These policies - blatant war crimes - have quietly become the new normal in the United States, fully accepted by both parties, embraced so completely that they are not even worth mentioning anymore.

This is one reason why I believe Barack Obama is a worse president than George W. Bush.