WWJD?

In my early adulthood, I read books on Saint Francis of Assissi (1181/1182 -1226). I was especially impressed by his living his life in imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) and that set me on a  certain path. Later, in the 1980's, I encountered the book, In His Steps by Charles Sheldon, that portrayed late nineteenth century imitatio Christi in light of the Social Gospel. In the late 1990's and early 2000's, I read books by Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan on the Historical Jesus that further widened my path.

The subtitle of In His Steps is What Would Jesus Do? In the 1990's this phrase became popular with Christian youth and they used the letters WWJD.

In the lead up to the Iraq War, this question, "What would Jesus do?", kept coming to my mind. I knew the answer in that regard and I became quite distressed when my local church and local churches in general would not stand up for Jesus as the old song said. The heads of the major denominations, though,  including my own, had come out in opposition to the war. I took to the street in protest.

Recently, I was interested in the remarks of President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on February 2. I was impressed at how he spoke of the role that faith, his Christian faith, plays in his job as President. He spoke of not leaving our values at the door. He spoke of the importance of the Golden Rule, treating others as we wish to be treated. He spoke of the financial difficulties of many Americans today. He spoke of treating people fairly and providing opportunities for all. He even mentioned the most vulnerable among us. He did have some good words.

There is a question, though, that I would like to ask our President. I have posted previously on our use of drones in warfare. The President has spoken of how few civilian casualties have come from our drone attacks.  However, in August of 2011, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism produced a study that said at least 385 civilians had been killed by our drones in Pakistan in the last seven years and that at least 168 of these were children. Now my question is: Who Would Jesus Drone?

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As a postcript, I would like to link to a  very recent blog post-sermon by the Rev. Chuck Queen that speaks to WWJD. I believe it is quite worth reading.

Grounding Drones

Visit CODEPINK.org to see CP's latest news on their actions against drones, to take action, to get involved, and to get the facts. Go here.

Terror by Drones

On December 28, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an article from The Washington Post on President Obama’s expansion of the U.S. drone war--targeted killings and surveillance of adversaries by unmanned aircraft systems.

The only adviser to President Obama who questioned the expansion of the drone war was Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, who was later fired. Pres. Obama himself seems to have been noncommittal.

The advantage of targeted drone killings is that not as many U.S. personnel are killed as would be in a conventional war. This manner of war-making treats war as a video game. The pilots are located outside the theater, often inside the United States, and operate the drones by a joystick . The remote pilots, however, can suffer psychological repercussions from their actions.


The drone attacks often end up killing civilians, even children. Neither the intelligence nor the targeting is always accurate.

On the same day that the Herald-Leader published The Washington Post article, the Los Angeles Times published an article telling of Pakistani death squads that were going after informants to the U.S. drone program. The drone program has increased hatred of the United States.

The legality of the drone attacks according to international law has been questioned. The group Human Rights Watch sent a letter to President Obama on December 16, 2011 declaring that the US government should clarify fully and publicly its legal rationale for conducting targeted drone killings and the legal limits on such strikes. The group especially questioned the drone killings by the Central Intelligence Agency and stated the strikes should be confined to the U.S. armed forces.

The targeted killings and surveillance by drones are especially heinous. They are a dehumanizing and distancing way of war-making that, thus, make war-making all that much easier. War is getting completely out of hand. Instead of expanding our war-making with drones, we should be ending our War of Terror on Terror.

Droning

Below is a slideshow by CODEPINK'er MacGregor Eddy depicting the unmanned aircraft systems known as drones and calling for an end to their use.

Obama's Middle East and N. Africa

I have come to believe that my country, the United States of America, is two-faced. We tend to have great values, such as human rights, but tend to act toward other countries, and sometimes against our own people, in a completely contrary manner. I mentioned before that the Native Americans used to say, especially in those "Westerns" of my younger days, that the white man speaks with forked tongue. The Native Americans certainly experienced first hand our contrariness.

In their post for CODEPINK's blog, PINKtank, Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of both CODEPINK and Global Exchange, and Charles Davis, an independent journalist, seem to be saying the same thing about President Obama's major speech on May 20 at the State Department regarding the Middle East and North Africa. We speak of and commend non-violence, but act in a completely different manner.

Here are some excerpts ~

**Given that President Obama daily authorizes the firing of hellfire missiles and the dropping of cluster bombs in places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it was awful odd seeing him wax eloquent this week about the “moral force of non-violence” in places like Egypt and Tunisia. But there he was, the commander-in-chief of the largest empire in history, praising the power of peaceful protest in countries with repressive leaders backed by his own administration.

Were we unfamiliar with his actual policies – more than doubling the troops in Afghanistan, dramatically escalating a deadly drone war in Pakistan and unilaterally bombing for peace in Libya – it might have been inspiring to hear a major head of state reject violence as a means to political ends. Instead, we almost choked on the hypocrisy.

* *Yet even for all his talk of human rights and how he “will not tolerate aggression across borders” – yes, a U.S. president said this – Obama didn’t even feign concern about Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime invading neighboring Bahrain to put down a pro-democracy movement there. In fact, the words “Saudi Arabia” were never uttered.

**The president also didn’t deviate from his policy of “unshakable” support for Israeli militarism, typified by his administration’s efforts to safeguard the Jewish state from accountability for its war crimes in Gaza – crimes that left some 1,400 Palestinians dead – and his determination to hand an already wealthy nation more than $3 billion a year in military aid, even as it flaunts the “peace process” and colonizes ever more Palestinian land. 

**Obama’s remarks on the killing of Osama bin Laden were likewise delivered with a complete lack of self-awareness. Describing the latter as a “mass murderer,” Obama – who since taking office has the blood of hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani civilians on his hands – said bin Laden’s philosophy of using bloodshed to achieve desired political changes had been discredited “through the moral force of non-violence” that has swept the region. 

You can read the full post here:  Obama Should Follow His Own Advice on the ‘Moral Force’ of Non-Violence | PINKtank.


Somehow: May Peace Prevail in the Middle East and North Africa. May Peace Prevail in United States Foreign Policy.

Osama bin Laden's Death

The US Needs to Focus on Not Creating Any More bin Ladens | | AlterNet

I would like to recommend this wonderful interview with Samina Sundas, the founder of American Muslim Voice, a post-9-11 group, by Rae Abileah, a Jewish-American of Israeli descent and a CODEPINK organizer. The interview is rather lengthy, but well worth the read. Sundas speaks to American foreign policy and I believe we need to take heed.

The interview was done the morning following the assasination of Osama bin Laden by the United States.

The Bomber's Message

In US District Court in Manhattan on Monday, June 21, 2010 Faisal Shazad, a Pakistan-born US citizen pleaded guilty to a failed car bomb attack on Times Square. Below is an excerpt of his testimony before Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum as taken from an Associated Press article, "Failed NY Car Bomber: I'm Guilty," by Tom Hays and Larry Neumeister as published in the Lexington Herald-Leader of Tuesday, June 22, 2010. The bomber has a message for us. Think about it.

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The judge repeatedly interrupted Shazad, including when he said his plot was to retailiate against the United States and the forces of up to 50 other countries, that had "attacked Muslim lands."

Cederbaum said, "But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night. Did you look around to see who they were?"

"Well the people select the government," Shazad said. "We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit ... "

Cederbaum interrupted again: "Including the children?"

Shazad answered: "Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims."

Later he added, "I am part of the answer to the U.S. terorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. and, on behalf of that, I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

Ground the Drones

I know that there are people who think I am completely unrealistic when it comes to war. These are people who believe that wars are necessary evils, that you do what you have to do when it comes to protecting the nation--even waging wars of aggression and/or revenge, and that in wars people die, including civilians.

However that may be, I have been utterly distressed by our illegal and immoral war of aggression in Iraq and our subsequent occuption of that country. I have been distressed, too, by our war in Afghanistian that is spilling over into Pakistan. Many people have been sacrificed for our need (greed?) for hegemony and resources.

I am also distressed by our remote use of attack drones, especially in Pakistan. These drones are being used also in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These low-flying pilotless aircraft played like videogames with a joystick by mostly 19-year old soldiers are sent from Creech Air Force Base in the desert outside of Las Vegas. War is dehumanizing enough as it is. Aerial bombing has always been remote and dehumanizing and now here we are using robotics, including the Predator and Reaper drones, controlled from a greater distance, dehumanizing further. This, to me, is chilling.

Kathy Kelley of Voices of Creative Nonviolence made a trip to Pakistan and published a piece on Common Dreams concerning drones on June 25 entitled, Now We See You, Now We Don’t.

She wrote:

A villager who survived a drone attack in North Waziristan explained that even the children, at play, were acutely conscious of drones flying overhead. After a drone attack, survivors trying to bring injured victims to a hospital were dumbfounded when a driver stopped, learned of their plight and then sped away. Then it dawned on them that the driver was afraid the drone would still be prowling overhead and that he might be targeted for associating with victims of the attack.


The U.S. drone aircraft can see Pakistan - their pilots in air-conditioned Nevada trailers see the terrain even though they are physically thousands of miles away.


...


On Tuesday, June 23rd, U.S. drones launched an attack on a compound in South Waziristan. Locals rushed to the scene to rescue survivors. The U.S. drone then launched more missiles at them, leaving a total of 13 dead. The next day, local people were involved in a funeral procession when the U.S. struck again. Reuters reported that 70 of the mourners were killed.

Kelley concluded her article by saying:

If we want to counter Al-Qaeda, if we want to be safe from further terrorist attacks, we'd do well to remember that even when we don’t recognize the humanity of people bearing the brunt of our wars, these very people have eyes to see and ears to hear. They must be asking themselves, who are the terrorists?

As part of a series of interviews with women from war-torn countries, CODEPINK: Women for Peace interviewed Fawzia Afzal-Khan, a Pakistani-American and English professor at Montclair State University in N.J. about the escalating crisis in Pakistan. The interview was published as their PINKtank blog entry of July 8, 2009. Here is an excerpt:

Many have criticized the Obama administration for its efforts in Pakistan from the perspective of shifting attention from Afghanistan, or for being too supportive of the Pakistan government or not enough. How would you describe the relationship between U.S. efforts in Afghanistan versus those in Pakistan? Do you feel the situation in both countries are unreasonably or faultily linked?


Faultily linked — the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and to broaden it with its drone attacks on the Pakistani side of the Durand line border is to inflame passions against U.S. involvement further amongst the Pakhtoons in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to further strengthen Pakistani citizens anger against U.S. interference and killings of ordinary people and thus also strengthen impression of Pakistani Taliban as freedom fighters standing up against U.S. imperialism.


…


Many argue drone attacks are the only way to kill Taliban or Al Qaeda members, others argue they must be abolished as they are not worth the number of civilians that may be killed. Based on your understanding, do you believe most Pakistani people support the use of drones?


I do not think most Pakistanis support the use of drones–but many do. Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent Pakistani physicist and social activist, has written extensively on this issue and he actually believes drone attacks may be the lesser of the two evils (the other being Taliban insurgency). However, he too in recent writings says that the drone attacks create bad publicity for the us which is already regarded unfavorably by the majority of the population. And if you think about it, how many Taliban have really been gotten rid of as a result of these attacks? I think the solution has to be political and economic, not military–or certainly not only or even predominantly a military one.


According to a poll released this week, more than 80 percent of Pakistanis view the Taliban and Al Qaeda as a critical threat to the country, and U.S. officials believe this will help efforts to fight both groups. Do you have a sense of what efforts Pakistanis feel the government should undertake to fight Taliban and Al Qaeda, and what the U.S. role in this should be?


Yes, Pakistani have finally woken up to the serious threat posed to the nation state by these Islamist extremist groups and want them to be eliminated–but not at the cost of their sovereignty. So I think most Pakistanis want to see real change in government policies which address the root causes of inequities in the country which have led to the rise and support for extremism and madrassa culture. What the U.S. and Pak govt must do is build educational and economic infrastructure of the country and help the people help themselves in their own ways…not impose solutions from the outside. The U.S. should also stop supporting corrupt regimes and leaders like Asif Ali Zardari and look to local, organic leaders and grassroots movements and support them.

A July 9 article in the D.C. publication called The Hill had this:

The poll of more than 2,500 Pakistanis, conducted across rural and urban areas at the end of July by Gallup Pakistan for Al-Jazeera, found that 41 percent favored their government's military operation against the Taliban, while 22 percent claimed neutrality and 24 percent opposed.


But only 9 percent approved of U.S. strikes by unmanned drones against Taliban and al-Qaeda targets. National Security Adviser James Jones said Sunday that the U.S. is 90 percent confident that Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of Pakistan's Taliban, was killed when a drone fired at the house of Mehsud's father-in-law on Wednesday.


"Mehsud was a very bad individual, a real thug," Jones said.


Pakistanis, though, fingered the U.S. as the enemy in the poll.


A whopping 59 percent -- a figure that cut fairly evenly across party lines, gender, language and age -- said that the U.S. is the greatest threat to Pakistan. Only 11 percent named the Taliban, and 18 percent said India was the greatest threat. Twelve percent responded "don't know."

In a July 6 article in TheTelegraph of the UK, a British judge spoke of the possibility of an international ban on the drones:

Lord Bingham, who retired last year as a senior law lord, said the aircraft could follow other weapons considered "so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance" in being consigned to the history books.


He likened drones, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, to cluster bombs and landmines.


Lord Bingham made the comments to the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in an interview which addressed the issue of the state being bound by the rule of law.


"Are there, for example, and this goes to conflict, not post-conflict situations, weapons that ought to be outlawed?" he said.


"From time to time in the history of international law various weapons have been thought to be so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance. I think cluster bombs and landmines are the most recent examples.


"It may be - I'm not expressing a view - that unmanned drones that fall on a house full of civilians is a weapon the international community should decide should not be used."

Just a few days ago, on Friday, August 21, Al-Jazeera English published an article about a drone raid in Pakistan that included this:

At least 10 people have been killed after a suspected US drone fired missiles into Pakistan's North Waziristan region, Pakistani intelligence agency officials have said.


The raid on Friday on Darpa Kheil village was the third such attack this month in Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribal areas by what are believed to be CIA-operated pilotless aircraft.


"The attack caused a huge explosion," said a Reuters reporter in Miranshah, about 2km from the scene of the raid.
Drones were seen flying over the area after the blast, he said.


Darpa Kheil village is home to a large madrassa, or religious school, set up by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former veteran Afghan fighter commander who is also a senior Taliban leader.


US drone aircraft attacked the complex in September last year, killing 23 people, most of them members of Haqqani's family.

On Monday, July 13, CODEPINK and others rallied at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada against the use of the drones. You can read the press release with the explanation here. In the PINKtank blog it was then reported:

In trying to engage in civil disobedience by trying to block traffic into the base, three people were arrested — Father Louis Vitale, Nobel Prize-nominee Kathy Kelly, and Lisa (not sure of last name) from Bellingham, WA. Several more people were injured. Seeing all of it, and men with their M16s, really gives you a taste of what it must feel like living under the horrors of occupation.

CODEPINK plans to return to the site September 25 through 30 for further demonstrations against those drones.

On Saturday, August 22, Kavita Ramdas the President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, wrote in an article published on Common Dreams:

Ordinary people are the victims, caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and the West's precision drones that leave villages in towns with countless orphaned and maimed children and widows.

Mr. Obama, please stop the wars and ground the drones.