How Come?

How come when Osama bin Laden plans and carries out an attack that kills 3,000 Americans, he is branded a "terrorist," hunted down by the U.S. after billions of dollars and two wars are started to find him and eventually found and summarily executed mafia style in a compound in Pakistan, but when innocent Pakistanis are wounded or killed in drone attacks ordered by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama, nobody calls the president a "terrorist"?

I'm glad Osama is not around to plan and carry out more terror attacks.

I bet many Pakistanis will feel the same way when Obama is gone from power.

From McClatchy in December, 2010:

There's been a massive ramp-up in drone strikes under the Obama administration, a weapon the U.S. considers highly effective, particularly against Taliban and al Qaida extremists based across the border from Afghanistan in Pakistan's remote tribal area.

There was no way of verifying the stories of the drone victims who've come forward. They all denied links to militants and claimed that the strikes were hitting mostly civilians. They described a terrifying existence under the drones in North Waziristan, the focus of the strikes.

A 13-year-old boy, Saddam Hussain, said that he lost his 10-month-old niece and sister-in-law in a strike on their house on the night of Oct. 9, in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan. Hussain carried a large picture of the baby girl with him.

"The drones patrol day and night. The sound comes when they fly lower down. Sometimes we see six in the air all at once," Saddam said. "When they come down, people run out of their houses, even at night."

Saddullah, a 15-year-old who goes by one name, also had made the journey from North Waziristan. He lost an eye and both legs in a drone strike last year, near Mir Ali town, he said. Three family members died, including an uncle who used a wheelchair. He said that instead of his three relatives, it was reported at the time that the strike killed three Taliban commanders.

"I was drinking tea with my family ... when it struck," said the shy 15-year-old, who now walks on prosthetic legs.

There was another drone strike Friday, adding to the 107 already recorded this year, according to a tally by the New America Foundation, an independent research organization based in Washington. That compares with 53 hits in 2009 and 34 in 2008. Of the strikes this year, 97 percent have been in North Waziristan, where a witch's brew of jihadist groups are based, including the Haqqani network, possibly the most effective insurgent outfit in Afghanistan.

Since the strikes began in 2004, 1,286 to 1,981 people have died in the bombardment, according to the New America Foundation. At least 32 senior al Qaida, Afghan Taliban or Pakistani Taliban commanders were killed in those strikes. Many of the rest would be midlevel militants and foot soldiers. It's broadly thought that the strikes are often accurate, but the number of civilians who are dying, from faulty intelligence or collateral damage, is unknown.

Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a U.S.-based human rights group, said in a report this week that unnamed U.S. officials had put civilian deaths from drone strikes at 20 to 30 since the beginning of last year. Yet CIVIC's own small sample of nine strikes uncovered 30 civilian deaths, including at least 14 women and children.

The U.S. estimates of civilian casualties are far too low, said Christopher Rogers, Pakistan field fellow at CIVIC. "There's no accountability, no one is keeping count of the civilian deaths and no compensation is paid."

I guess innocent Pakistani casualties from drone attacks is just the kind of "data" the "data-driven" president doesn't want tracked or released.

As Americans danced over the news of the death of Bin Laden a few weeks back, I couldn't help but think of the drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the innocent people killed in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the innocents killed in the undeclared actions in places like Pakistan and Yemen, and wonder if the people in those countries wouldn't dance in the street with joy if Bush or Obama were executed the way Osama was.

I bet they would.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald writes how these actions against "terrorists" perpetuate themselves and the Forever War:

The New York Times reports today:

For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy. . . .

"American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," [the district's governor, Abdul Khalid]. said. "People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.

The boy, [15], was the son of an Afghan National Army soldier . . . When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy’s village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans . . .

The police opened fire in an effort to push back the crowd to stop its advance to the district center. A 14-year-old boy was killed, and at least one other person was wounded, Mr. Khalid said. . . .

On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.

There's nothing much new to say here, but every now and then, it's worth highlighting not only what we're doing, but what the results are. Just imagine the accumulated hatred from having things like this happen day after day, week after week, year after year, for a full decade now, with no end in sight -- broadcast all over the region. It's literally impossible to convey in words the level of bloodthirsty fury and demands for vengeance that would arise if a foreign army were inside the U.S. killing innocent American children even a handful of times, let alone continuously for a full decade.

It's the perfect self-perpetuating cycle: (1) They hate us and want to attack us because we're over there; therefore, (2) we have to stay and proliferate ourselves because they hate us and want to attack us; (3) our staying and proliferating ourselves makes them hate us and want to attack us more; therefore, (4) we can never leave, because of how much they hate us and want to attack us. The beauty of this War on Terror -- and, as the last two weeks have demonstrated, War is the bipartisan consensus for what we are and should be doing to address Terrorism -- is that it forever sustains its own ostensible cause.

War is Peace and Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.