G Greenwald: AP refuses to use WH/NBC propaganda terms for Iraq

Glen Greenwald

On August 18,NBC Newsanchor Brian Williams began his broadcast — shown live to West Coast viewers, something done only for very significant occasions – by excitedly declaring:  ”It’s gone on longer than the Civil War, longer than World War II.  And tonight, U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq.”  He immediately called in Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, who was exclusively embedded with the 4th Stryker Brigade.  Engel excitedly announced that “the last American combat troops rolled” into Kuwait just moments ago.

We were then treated to grainy video of the khaki-dressed Engel “rolling out” with the Brigade, interviews with American soldiers describing what a historic event this was, all while the “NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE” logo was plastered on the screen — quite reminiscent of the embedded media coverage that glorified the invasion itself.  Even Williams noted the similarity:  ”We watched the invasion happen on live television thanks to, at the time, some brand new and exclusive technology.  Well, tonight again we have watched the pullout of combat troops the same way.”  At the end of the 7-minute segment, Williams heaped praise on Engel, whom he hailed as “our own young veteran of this conflict,” for this ”astounding bit of reporting.”

Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, hours of continuous melodramatic coverage were devoted to this story, and the cable network’s various personalities treated the event at least as reverentially as Williams did.   Keith Olbermann donned his most solemn baritone to begin his program this way:

Two thousand six hundred and sixty-six days since President Bush declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq.

Two thousand seven hundred and eight days since American forces invaded Iraq.

At this hour, American combat forces are leaving Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD ENGEL, NBC NEWS CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: I think we‘re coming right up to the Kuwaiti border now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: This is a special edition of COUNTDOWN.

Chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, in a world exclusive, embedded with, reporting live from the last convoy of American combat troops as it leaves Iraq via the Kuwait border.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You’re watching the end of an era of the American military.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: With Rachel Maddow inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, and Chris Matthews, Lawrence O‘Donnell, Eugene Robinson, Howard Fineman, Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon, retired General Paul Eaton, retired Colonel Jack Jacobs, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and former weapons inspector Charles Duelfer.

From Baghdad, from the Iraq-Kuwait border, from Washington, from New York — this is COUNTDOWN’s special continuing live coverage ofthe end of America’s Iraq combat mission.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

As Olbermann indicated, Maddow was in Baghdad’s “Green Zone,” and she explained:  ”it is really, really hot right now. But yet, seeing what we just saw, right here live with that gate closing, the last U.S. combat troop, I’m totally covered in goose bumps. It is an important moment.”

It’s not difficult to understand why NBC and MSNBC hyped the event the way they did.  The reason they had what Olbermann touted as a “worldwide exclusive” is because — in response to NBC embed requests — the Pentagon contacted them and offered exclusivity, knowing that the arrangement would incentivize NBC to treat the event as something of monumental historic importance.  By selecting NBC as the only broadcast network to be told in advance, swearing them to secrecy, but arranging for them to cover it exclusively with video, it became their story, and they thus, predictably, were eager to tout its importance.  That’s the natural inclination when someone is given exclusive access by the Government.  Maddow explained how the Pentagon arranged in secret for this exclusive coverage of the “momentous” event to be given to NBC and MSNBC:

By offering it exclusively to both NBC and MSNBC, the Pentagon ensured that this narrative would be given the Seriousness imprimatur from NBC, and would produce base-pleasing, Obama-favorable praise from MSNBC personalities.  Having Engel embedded in a Stryker vehicles as it “rolled out” of Iraq, and Maddow stationed in the Green Zone, added to the historic tone of the evening.  As The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter reported:  ”David Verdi, an NBC News vice president, added, ‘The military had said, ‘You are the ones who are going to broadcast it first’.” About that, Mediaite‘s Steve Kraukauer wrote:  ”That’s a stunning admission, and shows a degree of coziness between both sides here.”  With this cooperative venture, the White House got exactly the coverage it wanted:  the repeatedly hyped claim that under Barack Obama, “American combat forces are leaving Iraq,” as Olbermann intoned at the start.

One of the few sour notes in this coverage came when Olbermann briefly interviewed McClatchy‘s Jonathan Landay, and asked him what the 50,000 remaining soldiers would be doing.  Landay explained:

This is the great irony for me, Keith. The fact is that under the delusional plans that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had approved for the invasion of Iraq, they had intended to come down to 50,000 troops within three or four months of that invasion. . . . .That, for me, is the ultimate irony, is the fact that more than seven years later, we‘ve now gotten down to the 50,000 troops that they thought they could get down to within three months of the invasion. . . . . [T]hose 50,000 men and women include special forces who will be going out on counter-terrorism missions with Iraqi forces. That, to me, is combat. They’re armed. They’re going into combat.  There will be American, quote/unquote, advisers going out with Iraqi forces on regular patrols. That to me opens the door to combat.

So I don‘t think we‘re going to see the end of – we are not going to see the end of combat for American forces I don‘t think in Iraq.

The 50,000 troops staying in Iraq were noted several times by the various MSNBC commentators, especially Maddow, but, other than the Landay interview, it did not detract from the repetitious claim that — to use Brian Williams’ formulation — “U.S. combat troops have pulled out of Iraq.”  This, of course, was the same message touted in Barack Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation on Wednesday night:

So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.

Yesterday, however, the Associated Press’ Standards Editor, Tom Kent,issued a memorandum to AP editors and reporters instructing them not to use this White-House-created formulation that “combat operations in Iraq are over,” on the simple ground of inaccuracy:

Whatever the subject, we should be correct and consistent in our description of what the situation in Iraq is. This guidance summarizes the situation and suggests wording to use and avoid.

To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents.  . . . .

As for U.S. involvement, it also goes too far to say that the U.S. part in the conflict in Iraq is over. President Obama said Monday night that “the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

However, 50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on.

In addition, although administration spokesmen say we are now at the tail end of American involvement and all troops will be gone by the end of 2011, there is no guarantee that this will be the case.

Our stories about Iraq should make clear that U.S. troops remain involved in combat operations alongside Iraqi forces, although U.S. officials say the American combat mission has formally ended. We can also say the United States has ended its major combat role in Iraq, or that it has transferred military authority to Iraqi forces. We can add that beyond U.S. boots on the ground, Iraq is expected to need U.S. air power and other military support for years to control its own air space and to deter possible attack from abroad.

The ability of the Pentagon to shape coverage through controlling access, offering embedding, and doling out exclusives is too well-known and well-documented by now to require much discussion.  The problem, however, is that it remains irresistibly enticing for many media outlets to submit to it.  The fact that NBC/MSNBC was the only television news outlet with video of the “last combat brigade rolling out of Iraq” was a major coup.  The only way that coup matters — the only way the journalists covering this event ”exclusively” can feel as though they’re doing something important — is if they vest the event with historic significance, accomplished by touting it as “the end of America‘s Iraq combat mission,” exactly the message the administration wanted disseminated.

The fact that this phrase — “the end of America‘s Iraq combat mission” — is more propagandistic than anything gave no pause.  The withdrawal of 100,000 troops from that country since Obama’s inauguration is not insignificant, and it’s a good thing that he’s adhered to the withdrawal schedule.  But, as Landay explained, 50,000 troops is a huge number — it’s what Rumsfeld originally envisioned as the occupying force to be used three months after the invasion — and it’s inevitable that they will be in combat.  And that’s to say nothing of the large number of private-militias which remain — paid for by American citizens — as well as the so-called “private army” which the State Department is currently assembling, to be deployed in that country.  That’s why AP refuses to use these misleading terms ”even if they come from senior officials.”  That, and because they weren’t the ones gifted with the “worldwide exclusive” coverage by the Obama administration and its Pentagon.

\\GLENN GREENWALD

US scientist charged with attempting to sell military secrets to Israel

Stewart Nozette, 52, arrested after demanding Israeli passport during FBI sting

A former Nasa scientist who helped discover evidence of water on the moon has been charged with attempting to sell Israel secrets about America’s military satellite systems.

Stewart Nozette, 52, from Maryland, was arrested in an FBI sting after demanding cash and an Israeli passport in return for classified information obtained when he worked with a high security clearance for the US space agency, the Pentagon and an energy department laboratory where he helped to develop a radar that indicated there is ice on the south pole of the moon.

Although the indictment does not allege that Israeli agents had already recruited Nozette, it says that he had already been paid a substantial amount of money to work as a consultant to an Israeli state-owned defence firm in return for “answering questions from the company”. During an FBI surveillance operation before the sting, Nozette also allegedly acknowledged to a colleague that he had committed a crime and threatened to flee the country and tell everything he knows to Israel.

The case is potentially a further embarrassment for Israel at a time of unusually strained relations with the US after a number of cases of Americans accused of spying for the Jewish state in recent years.

The prosecutor in Washington, Channing Phillips, said: “Those who would put our nation’s defence secrets up for sale can expect to be vigorously prosecuted.”

The FBI launched its sting last month when an agent contacted Nozette posing as a spy for Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. The scientist and undercover agent met later in the day at a hotel and discussed an exchange of classified information for cash. Court papers say that Nozette told the agent he had access to much of what the “US has done in space”.

“These are among the most sensitive subjects and it will have to be recreated from memory over some time,” he said.

It was then agreed that the scientist would pass his information at a post office. “I don’t get recruited by Mossad every day. I knew this day would come,” Nozette is heard saying on a wiretap, according to the court papers.

In the following weeks, the FBI left two envelopes with a total of $11,000 (£6,700) in cash and questions about classified information for the scientist to answer. Nozette replied with information about the US satellite and military early warning systems, and its attack response system.

The undercover agent also supplied the scientist with a mobile phone to send text messages and gave him an alias that was supposedly to appear on his new Israeli passport.

Investigators have not said why they latched onto Nozette. But according to court papers, the scientist worked for more than a decade as a technical consultant for Israel Aerospace Industries, a government-owned defence firm during which he was paid $225,000 to answer “the company’s questions and, in return, Nozette received regular payments from the company”.

Continue reading: THE GUARDIAN

“Hostile” Iran Sparks U.S. Attack Plan

Pentagon Wary Of Tehran’s Expanding Nuclear Program And Support Of Iraqi Insurgents

A second American aircraft carrier steamed into the Persian Gulf on Tuesday as the Pentagon ordered military commanders to develop new options for attacking Iran. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the planning is being driven by what one officer called the “increasingly hostile role” Iran is playing in Iraq – smuggling weapons into Iraq for use against American troops.

“What the Iranians are doing is killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq,” said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

U.S. officials are also concerned by Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf as well as Iran’s still growing nuclear program. New pictures of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant show the country’s defense minister in the background, as if deliberately mocking a recent finding by U.S. intelligence that Iran had ceased work on a nuclear weapon.

No attacks are imminent and the last thing the Pentagon wants is another war, but Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen has warned Iran not to assume the U.S. military can’t strike.

“I have reserve capability, in particular our Navy and our Air Force so it would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” Mullen said.

Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq. Later this week Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is expected to confront the Iranians with evidence of their meddling and demand a halt.

If that doesn’t produce results, the State Department has begun drafting an ultimatum that would tell the Iranians to knock it off – or else.

(CBS News)

Pentagon Suddenly Suspends Bush War Propaganda Investigation

The Pentagon announced on Friday that it was suspending its briefings for retired military officers who often appear as military analysts on television and radio programs.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said the briefings and all other interactions with the military analysts had been suspended indefinitely pending an internal review.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that since 2002 the Pentagon has cultivated several dozen military analysts in a campaign to generate favorable coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. The retired officers have made tens of thousands of appearances for television and radio networks, holding forth on Iraq, Afghanistan, detainee issues and terrorism in general.

Records and interviews show that the Bush administration worked to transform the analysts into an instrument intended to shape coverage from inside the major networks.

(Continue reading: New York Times)

US warns Iran of retaliation over Iraq action

America’s top military officer has ratcheted up the pressure on Iran by issuing an unusual public warning that the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action”.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, blamed the Iranian government and Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for its “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq. He said conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” for America’s overstretched forces, but added: “It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability.”

Mullen said he was increasingly concerned about Iran’s growing involvement in supplying munitions and training to rebel Shi’ite militias and “killing American and coalition soldiers in Iraq”.

Speaking at a Pentagon news conference late on Friday, he said recent operations in the southern port city of Basra had revealed “just how much and how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment instability”. A Pentagon source said the admiral’s frankness was “extremely significant” and could pave the way for some form of attack on Iran. However, Mullen said: “The solution right now still lies in using other levers of national power, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure.”

(Continue reading: Times Online)

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

In the

summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

(Continue reading: New York Times)

Bush Diplomacy: Predator Planes Are Conducting Assassinations by Air

Attacks all over the planet by U.S. Predator planes suggest Bush thinks he has the “right” to kill civilians.

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a small town somewhere near the Southern California coast. You’re going about your daily life, trying to scrape by in hard times, when the missile hits. It might have come from the Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — its pilot at a base on the outskirts of Tehran — that has had the village in its sights for the last six hours or from the Russian sub stationed just off the coast. In either case, it’s devastating.

In Moscow and Tehran, officials announce that, in a joint action, they have launched the missile as part of a carefully coordinated “surgical” operation to take out a “known terrorist,” a long-term danger to their national security. A Kremlin spokesman offers the following statement:

“As we have repeatedly said, we will continue to pursue terrorist activities and their operations wherever we may find them. We share common goals with respect to fighting terrorism. We will continue to seek out, identify, capture and, if necessary, kill terrorists where they plan their activities, carry out their operations or seek safe harbor.”

A family in a ramshackle house just down the street from you — he’s a carpenter; she works at the local Dairy Queen — are killed along with their pets. Their son is seriously wounded, their home blown to smithereens. Neighbors passing by as the missile hits are also wounded.

As it happens, there are no terrorists in the vicinity. Outraged, you organize your neighbors and march angrily in protest through the town, shouting anti-Russian, anti-Iranian slogans. But, of course, there is nothing you can really do. Iran and Russia are far away, their weaponry powerful, your arms nonexistent. The state of California is incapable of protecting you. This is, in fact, at least the fourth time in recent months that a “terrorist” has been declared “taken out” from the air or by a ship-based cruise missile, when only innocent Californians have died.

As news of the “collateral damage” from the botched operation dribbles out, the Russian and Iranian media pay next to no attention. There are no outraged editorials. Official spokesmen see no need to comment further. No one is held responsible and no promises are made in either Tehran or Moscow that similar assassination strikes won’t be launched in the near future, based on “actionable intelligence,” possibly even on the same town. In fact, the next day, seeing UAVs once again soaring overhead, you load your pick-up and prepare to flee.

Swatting Flies in Somalia

Philip K. Dick meet George W. Bush. When it comes to such a thing happening in the United States, we are, of course, at the wildest frontiers of science fiction. The U.S. is a sovereign nation. We guard our air space and coastal waters jealously. Any country violating them for purposes of aggressive action, no less by launching a missile against an American town, would be committing an act of war and would certainly be treated accordingly.

If, somehow, such an event did occur, it would be denounced in Washington and on editorial pages across the country as a shocking contravention of international legal conventions and a crime of war unless, of course, we did it in a country where sovereignty has been declared meaningless.

In fact, an almost exact replica of the above fictional incident — at least the fourth of its kind in recent months — did indeed take place at the beginning of March in the embattled failed state of Somalia. (For that country’s most recent abysmal collapse, the Bush administration, via an invasion by Ethiopian proxy forces, can take significant credit.) One or two houses in Dobley, a Somali town, were hit, possibly by two submarine-launched Tomahawk Cruise missiles in what a U.S. official termed “a deliberate strike against a suspected bed-down of known terrorists.”

The missiles were evidently meant for Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an al-Qaedan suspect in the bloody bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He was, however, not in Dobley, despite the “actionable intelligence” on hand. Accounts of the dead and wounded in the town vary. One report claimed only wounded Somalis (and two dead cows); most spoke of anywhere from four to ten dead civilians. Local district Commissioner Ali Nur Ali Dherre told CNN that three women and three children had been killed and another 20 people wounded. While a “U.S. military official said the United States is still collecting post-strike information and is not yet able to confirm any casualties. He described [the] strike as ‘very deliberate’ and said forces tried to use caution to avoid hitting civilians.”

For the dead Somalis, not suprisingly, we have no names. In stories like this, the dead are regularly nobodies and, though the townspeople of Dobley did indeed march angrily in protest yelling anti-American slogans, just about no one noticed.

In our world, only the normal smattering of small news reports dealt with this modest sidebar in the President’s Global War on Terror (GWOT). On the GWOT scorecard — if you remember, for a long time George Bush kept “his own personal scorecard” of top terror suspects in a desk drawer in the Oval Office, crossing off al-Qaedan figures as U.S. forces took them down — this operation hardly registered. One terrorist missed, and not for the first time, possibly a few dead peasants in some god-forsaken land. Please, move on

In a recent Pentagon briefing for reporters featuring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen, who had just returned from a trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, 4,500 words of back-and-forth were interrupted by this question from a reporter:

“Secretary Gates, the strike on Somalia two days ago — did the missiles that were fired — did they strike their target? And was the target Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan? Do you have a report back from the field? And Admiral Mullen, what message did you give to President Musharraf, and why did you meet with him?”

Gates responded to the Somali part of the question in eight words: “You know we don’t talk about military operations.” He might have added: …unless they’re successful.

That was evidently all that the incident and its minor “collateral damage” deserved in such a global war. So Gates and Mullen moved on immediately. So many matters more important than a single “decapitation” strike that didn’t succeed to consider.

The Decapitation Strike as Global Policy

Minor as that Somali mis-strike might seem, this is not, in fact, a small matter. Think of that strike and the many like it around the world over these last years as reflections of George Bush’s post-9/11 update of globalization. After all, the most basic principle of his Global War on Terror has been the erasure of global boundaries and whatever international agreements about war-making might go with them.

Across the Islamic world, in particular, boundaries simply no longer matter. In fact, in such regions no aspect of sovereignty can now constrain a U.S. president from acting as he pleases in pursuit of whatever he may personally define as American interests.

“Assassinations by air” are, writes David Case in Mother Jones magazine, “a relatively new tactic in warfare.” By the beginning of 2006, however, U.S. Predator drones “bearing Hellfire missiles — the preferred weapon in decapitation [strikes] — had already hit ‘terrorist suspects overseas’ at least 19 times since 9/11.” Such strikes and other similar operations by air, land, and sea have been a crucial follow-on to the Bush administration’s proclamations, immediately after 9/11, that there would be no “safe havens” for terrorists on the planet, nor safety for those countries which housed them, inadvertently or otherwise. Within days of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, Bush administration officials were already identifying up to 60 countries-cum-targets.

This aspect of the Bush Doctrine, of what the President likes to call staying “on the offensive,” when mixed with a couple of decades of “advances” in air warfare, including the development of sophisticated, missile-armed drones, “smart bombs,” “precision-guided munitions,” and the like, has resulted in a lethal globalizing brew of assassination and destruction. It recognizes neither boundaries, nor sovereignty across much of the planet. With all its “actionable” possibilities, it will surely be with us long after George W. Bush has left office.

Of course, those few nameless dead or wounded Somali civilians — swatted like so many flies and forgotten as quickly as flies would be — don’t faintly match up against the “dozens” of Iraqi civilian deaths that, according to Human Rights Watch, were caused by 50 decapitation strikes launched against the top officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime back in March 2003. (Not a single official was harmed.) Nor do they quite make it into the company of the “Afghan elders” being taken to President Hamid Karzai’s inauguration back in 2001, who were mistaken “for a Taliban group” and bombed, with 20 killed; nor the 30 or more guests at an Afghan wedding party back in 2002 blown away by 2,000-pound bombs after celebratory gunfire was evidently mistaken for an attack (no apologies offered); nor that wedding party in the Western desert of Iraq near the Syrian border wiped out in 2004 with 42 deaths, including 27 in one extended family, 14 children in all. They were, of course, taken for terrorists. (As U.S. Major General James Mathis put the matter in offering an explanation: “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”) And these are just a few prominent cases, not including the civilians killed in periodic Predator and other strikes in Pakistani border areas, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere whom no fuss is ever made about — not here, anyway.

After all, there’s always going to be “collateral damage” when you keep your eye — and your 2,000-pound bomb or Hellfire missile — focused on the prize.

The “Right” to Kill Civilians

Remember back in the 1990s, when the glories of an economically borderless world were being limned? Just after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration proudly declared us to be in a far darker world without borders (except, of course, when it came to our own). In this new world, whether we knew it or not, whether we cared or not, we granted our highest officials — specifically our military and intelligence services — the full powers of prosecutor, defense counsel, judge, jury, and executioner, as well as the right to report on such events only to the extent, and as, they wished. This was the sort of power that monotheistic religions normally granted to an all-powerful god, that kingdoms generally left to absolute rulers, and that dictators have always tried to take for themselves (though just, of course, in the domains under their control).

Our domain, it seems, is now much of the globe, when it comes to the bloody work of assassinating individuals via bombs or missiles that, however precise, surgical, and smart, are weapons meant to kill en masse and largely without discrimination.

There are still limits of sorts on such actions. These put bluntly — though no one is likely to say this — are the limits imposed, in part, by racism, by gradations, however unspoken, in the global value given to a human life.

The Bush administration has, so far, only been willing to carry out “decapitation” strikes in countries where human life is, by implication, of less or little value. It has yet to carry one out in London or Hamburg or Tokyo or Moscow or the Chinese countryside, even though “terrorist suspects” abound everywhere, even (as with the Anthrax attacks of 2001) in our own country. On the other hand, given the impetus of this kind of globalization, who knows when such a strike might come. After all, the CIA has already carried out clearly illegal, sovereignty-violating “extraordinary rendition” operations (kidnappings of terror suspects) on the streets of European cities.

In this country, we still theoretically venerate the sovereign self (“the individual”) and that self’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Despite George Bush’s “Freedom Agenda,” however, the sovereignty, not to say the life, liberty, and happiness of other peoples, individually or collectively, have not really been much on our minds these last years. Our freedom of action, our safety, has been the only freedom, the only “security,” to which we have attached much global value. And don’t for a second think that, when the “actionable intelligence” comes in to John McCain’s, Hillary Clinton’s, or Barack Obama’s Oval Office, those Predators won’t be soaring or those cruise missiles leaving subs lurking off some coast — and that innocent civilians elsewhere won’t continue to die.

In places like Somalia, we deliver death, and every now and then an American bomb or missile actually obliterates a terrorist suspect. Then we celebrate. The rest of time, it’s hardly even news. When the deeper principle behind such global strikes is mentioned in our papers, in some passing paragraph, it’s done — as in a recent Washington Post article about a Predator strike, piloted from Nevada, that killed a suspected “senior al-Qaeda commander” in Pakistan — in this polite way: “Independent actions by U.S. military forces on another country’s sovereign territory are always controversial” (Imagine the language that the Washington Post would use, if that had been a Pakistani drone strike in Utah.)

This version of globalization is already so much the norm of our world that few here even blink an eye when it’s reported, or consider it even slightly strange. It’s already an American right. In the meantime, other people, who obviously don’t rise to the level of our humanity, regularly die.

And here’s the thing: In our world, there is a chasm that can never be breached between, say, a Sunni extremist clothed in a suicide vest who walks into a market in Baghdad with the barbaric intent of killing as many Shiite civilians as possible, and an air or missile attack, done in the name of American “security” and aimed at a “known terrorist,” that just happens to — repeatedly — kill innocent civilians. And yet, what if you know before you launch your attack, as American planners certainly must, that the odds are innocents (and probably no one else) will die?

Not so long ago in the United States, presidentially sanctioned assassinations abroad were illegal. But that was then, this is so now. Nonetheless, it’s a fact that the “right” to missile, bomb, shell, “decapitate,” or assassinate those we declare to be our enemies, without regard to borders or sovereignty, is based on nothing more than the power to do it. This is simply the “right” of force (and of technology). If the tables were turned, any American would recognize such acts for the barbarism they represent.

And yet, late last week, like clockwork, the Associated Press brought us the latest notice: “In Afghanistan, a spokesman for the American-led coalition said troops had used ‘precision-guided munitions’ to strike a compound about a mile inside Pakistan…” This operation was, as they all are, said to be based on “reliable intelligence”; in this case, “senior” Taliban commanders were said to be in residence.

As it happened, according to the Pakistani military and the AP reporter who made it to Tangrai, a village of about forty houses, the residence hit was that of “Noor Khan, a greengrocer who said the house was his family home.” The AP reporter added that “only one of its four walls was standing amid a tangle of mud bricks, bedding and cooking pots.” And Noor Khan, who was quoted saying, “We are innocent, we have nothing to do with such things,” claimed that six of his relatives, four women and two boys, had been killed. (The Pakistani military, on investigating, reported that two women and two children had died.)

This was but the latest minor decapitation strike, and — we can be sure of this — not the last. Philip K. Dick move over. We’re already in your future.

[Note: Let me strongly recommend David Case's article, "The U.S. Military's Assassination Problem," in the March/April issue of Mother Jones magazine, quoted in the above piece. A well researched, thoughtful, and rare discussion of what we know about the Bush administration's global assassination campaign from the air, it is an accomplishment. I have relied on it in writing this essay.]

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

//alternet//