Welcome To The Age Of Hell: Entrenching Murder As The American Way

(UPDATED BELOW)

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.

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