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| Jeremy Scahill |
Weighing in on President Obama's targeted drone strikes in the Middle
East, journalist Jeremy Scahill did not mince words.
During his appearance on MSNBC's "Up With Chris Hayes" Saturday
morning, Scahill repeatedly said that such attacks, when they killed innocent
civilians, amounted to "murder."
Asked by Hayes why he would use such a "loaded" word to describe the
strikes, Scahill responded at length.
"If someone goes into a shopping mall
in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people and guns
down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they've murdered those
people. When the Obama administration sets a policy where patterns of life are
enough of a green light to drop missiles on people or to send in AC130s to spray
them down..."
"But that wasn't the case here,"
interrupted retired colonel Jack Jacobs. "You're talking about a targeted person
here." Scahill continued:
"If you go to the village of
Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded cluster bombs and
you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do -- the women and children
that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized
on Yemen -- those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders,
because there was believed to be someone from al-Qaeda in that area. There's
only one person that's been identified that had any connection to al-Qaeda
there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S.
tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the
Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to
lie to the world about who did that bombing. It's murder -- it's mass murder -- when you say,
'We are going to bomb this area' because we believe a terrorist is there, and
you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an
obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are
there. I'm sorry, that's murder."
Scahill is the national security correspondent for The Nation, and
the author of the book "Blackwater: The World's Most Powerful Mercenary
Army."
He was part of a panel discussion that centered around a lengthy New
York Times article published on Tuesday, which disclosed that the Obama
administration maintains a "kill list" of wanted terrorists. Obama personally
signs off on the killing-by-drone of many suspects, taking into account the circumstances of a
possible attack, including possible civilian casualties.
The article says that Obama tries to avoid any loss of innocent life,
but that he considers any male in the area a combatant. Civilian deaths in drone
attacks have become a flashpoint in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. Article source and strong video on Huffington
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