STATE-SPONSORED EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLINGS: IS IT BECOMING THE NORM FOR WESTERN GOVERNMENTS THAT WE ARE EXPECTED TO ACCEPT?

Extra-judicial killings have always been a part of Western governmental culture. Recently, however, this activity has taken on a new turn inasmuch that they are being carried out without any effort to hide the fact that they are happening. They call them quite openly; ‘targeted assassinations’. The US and Israel have, until now, been relying on the public’s acceptance, at least in the West, that in the so-called ‘War against Terrorism’ the people that are being killed are the West’s enemy.

At first, while the shock of the attacks on the World Trade Center was still sinking in, the West were in no mood to question the methods the US and their allies used to ‘rid the world of terrorism’. But, as time went by and the initial shock began to subside, people began to question whether or not it really was ‘Islamic terrorists’ that perpetrated this crime. It was realised that those who we were told were ‘terrorists’ might instead be merely innocent scapegoats of Western greed and subterfuge.

After the way the Israelis behaved in their onslaught against the people of the Gaza Strip in 2006 and then again in 2008/2009, for example, many in the West wondered if, rather than being ‘terrorists’ as we were told, that the Palestinians that were labelled ‘terrorists’ by the Israelis and the US were actually nothing more than freedom fighters defending themselves against the deprivations and terrorism of Israeli Zionism. Israelis had for years been terrorising the Palestinians by murdering their leaders in state-sponsored extra-judicial killings – killings that usually not only killed the intended target, but often killed many innocent civilians as well.

In Afghanistan the US have recently been using similar methods against the Taliban using drone remote piloted vehicles (RPVs). The West has also been using Special Forces to what they euphemistically call; ‘taking out the bad guys’, whereby highly trained murderers sneak up on an unsuspecting and usually sleeping fighter defending his homeland from foreign invaders and then murder him and usually most of his family as well.

Slowly but surely the Western media have been acclimatising the public to a point where it now is (almost) an accepted norm in modern war-fighting – providing, of course, that it is ‘us’ doing it to ‘them’ and not ‘them’ going it to ‘us’, which would then become totally unacceptable.

Now, however, the situation has taken a new turn.

A few years ago the US launched a rocket from a drone that killed a number of so-called ‘terrorists’ travelling in an SUV. All in the vehicle were killed but among them was an American citizen. Compounding the crime was the fact that the US knew that there was an American citizen in the vehicle when the order was given to kill. Now the US is working on the legal aspects of how American citizens may be extra-judicially murdered by Presidential decree if they are found to be working with America’s enemies overseas. One has to wonder if the next step is likely to be the President giving clearance for American citizens to be extra-judicially murdered in the US simply for aiding America’s ‘enemies’ or even writing stuff that is anti-American and therefore considered as aiding America’s ‘enemies’.

Sounds far-fetched? Not really when you consider that before 9/11, while one suspected that the US very covertly did do away with its enemies, one would have never dreamed that such killings would become an everyday norm that would be accepted as part of modern living. The next step of bringing death to inside American living rooms (and I don’t mean via the TV) is not, it seems, a very big step the way things are going at the moment.