The Age of Hell

Entrenching Murder as the American Way

By Chris Floyd
Counter Punch
October 25, 2012

The Washington Post has just laid out, in horrifying, soul
slaughtering detail, the Obama Administration’s ongoing
effort to expand, entrench and “codify” the practice of
murder and terrorism by the United States government.

The avowed, deliberate intent of these sinister machinations
is to embed the use of death squads and drone terror attacks
into the policy apparatus of future administrations, so that
the killing of human beings outside all pretense of legal process
will go on, year after year after year, even when the Nobel Peace
Laureate has left office.

They have even come up with a new euphemism for state
murder: “disposition.”

The new “counterterrorism matrix” is “designed to go beyond
existing kill lists, mapping plans for the ‘disposition’ of suspects
beyond the reach of American drones,” the Post reports.



In other words, it involves expanding and varying the menu of
arbitrary murder, mixing the blunderbuss of drone blasts and
night raids with more selective “bullet-in-the-brain,” “bomb-
in-the-car-engine,” “polonium-in-the-pea-soup,” and “doping-
and-defenestration” approaches.

Arbitrary murder by unaccountable elites and their spies, paid for
by money taken from ordinary citizens, who have no say in and no
knowledge of what is being done in their names, and who will be
the victims of the inevitable blowback from the state terror and
murder campaign, this is now being “codified,” officially, formally,
as the American way.

To be fair and by all means, let us be fair with these butchers,
the term ‘disposition’ is also stretched to cover a multitude of
sins: kidnapping, rendition, indefinite detention, turning captives
over to proxy torturers.

But it is worth remembering that all of these dispositions including
the murders, wholesale and retail, involve “alleged” terrorists,
terrorist “suspects,” people who have found themselves, for
whatever reason (or no reason at all) on one of the innumerable
“lists” gathered by whatever method (or no method at all) by the
many fatly funded agencies now involved in “counter-terrorism.”

But that’s not all, not by a long shot.

These codified murders are also being inflicted on people who
are not on any list whatsoever: their names, affiliations, beliefs,
intentions, indeed their dispositions, are completely unknown to
those who kill them.

They are the faceless targets of “signature strikes,” which
allow American death squads to kill people based on “patterns
of activity” which may or may not signal some possible malign
intent or none, toward someone or no one, somewhere or
nowhere.

This rigorous process rests entirely on in the magical mind
reading abilities of drone jockeys ogling a computer screen.

If the armchair warrior doesn’t like the cut of someone’s jib,
then he squeezes his joystick and turns the stranger into “bug
splatter,” to use the term favored by our bold defenders of
civilization.

Like last year’s NY Times piece that first detailed the murder
racket being run directly out of the White House, the new
Washington Post story is replete with quotes from “senior
Administration officials” who have obviously been authorized
to speak.

Once again, this is a story that Obama and his team WANT
to tell.

They want you to know about the murder program and their
strenuous exertions to make it permanent; they are proud of
this, they think it makes them look good.

They want it to be part of their legacy, something they can pass
on to future generations: arbitrary, lawless, systematic murder.

Perhaps this fact should be borne in mind by all those anguished
progressives out there who keep telling themselves that Obama
will “be different, that he will “turn to the left,” if we can only
get him a second term.

No; the legacy of arbitrary, lawless, systematic murder is the
legacy he wants.

It is the legacy he has been building, with remarkable energy
and meticulous attention to detail, day after day, week after
week, for the past four years.

This is what he cares about.

And it is this, not jobs, not peace, not the environment, not
equal rights for women and ethnic and sexual minorities,
not the poor, not the middle class, not education, not
infrastructure, not science, not diplomacy, that he will apply
himself to in a second term, along with his only other political
passion, forging a “grand bargain” with Big Money to gut the
remaining shreds of the New Deal.

There is little point in going through the Post story and offering
detailed comment.

The sickening nature of this perpetual motion death machine
and the husk-like inhumanity of those who operate it and the
sycophants who applaud it are all too plain.

Just read the whole thing, and see for yourself.

See how these butchers, our bipartisan elites, our whole
respectable, self-righteous establishment, have trapped
us all in an Age of Hell.



Chris Floyd is an American writer and frequent contributor
to CounterPunch. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found
at www.chris-floyd.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/25/the-age-of-hell