It is sad and revolting to see how the recent gruesome shooting spree in Newtown Connecticut had claimed 27 innocent lives mostly children.
Yet what has been largely ignored by the public is how belligerent imperial US foreign policies continues to sow terror to unarmed civilians through drone warfare overseas.
This report from Daily Mail says that a US military personnel quit his job after learning of needless civilian deaths…many of them children.
A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico.Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container.But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.'I saw men, women and children die during that time,' he told Spiegel Online. 'I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all.'
Mass killings should be seen in a broader context and not just in the US.
As John Aziz at the lewrockwell.com/zero hedge observed: (bold original)
And if we value life and are opposed to violence against innocents, why do we demand action when 27 innocent Americans die, but not when larger numbers of innocent Pakistanis, or Afghanis or Yemenis die? One drone strike in Pakistan killed 69 children, dwarfing the impact of the Newtown Massacre. With predator drones now in American skies, how long until the “collateral damage” (remember – the NDAA declared the entirety of America as a battlefield) eclipses the Newtown massacre? Or how long until a foreign power or terrorist group hacks into a predator drone (technically feasible) over America and uses it as a flying bomb? And how many more terrorist attacks against America will be fuelled by anger derived from the civilian casualties of the drone wars?Obama might cry for Americans in Newtown, but where are his tears for the Pakistani and Yemeni children he has slaughtered? And what about for the many victims who died as a result of thousands guns shipped by the US government to the Mexican drug cartels via Fast and Furious?
The US government seem to promote the kind of policies it pretends to condemn. Drones as pointed out above (and in my previous post) is likely to become a commonplace security feature in the US which may entail the unintended consequences described above.
Yet it is hard to ignore of the possible influence of US foreign policies or the warfare state on her constituency or population. Or put differently, could the recent killing sprees signify as a policy blowback, where these assailants may have sublimely construed government's action as justifying their own?
