The Chris Moeller Archives

The Bomb and Ban Play

Donald Trump’s imperial executive actions are a terrifying escalation of the inhumane programs established first by President George W. Bush in 2001, and then brought to bipartisan normalization by President Barack Obama. Many commentators have noted that the seven countries upon which Trump has imposed his immigration ban-- Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Iran, did not produce any of the 9-11 hijackers, nor the killers of any Americans in any terrorist attack on American soil from 1975 to 2015. Fifteen of the 9-11 hijackers, conversely, were from Saudi Arabia.

What the citizens of these seven particular countries are being punished for then are not what they have done to us, but perversely, what we have done to them. They have been, minus Iran-- which has nuclear capabilities, the targets of our senseless and endless drone bombing campaigns over the last five years. In 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, an average of one every 20 minutes, somewhere on the people of these countries, 90% of his victims, innocents. Much of the bombing was covert-- or at least, intended to be. These refugees now being denied life in the United States-- and in many cases-- throughout Europe, are the Bush and Obama refugees.

In 2010, Barack Obama, acting under the outline of his administration’s “kill list,” ordered the assassination of an American citizen living in Yemen-- a cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. This man had never been convicted of crime, nor even charged with one. Obama’s order was successfully carried out via drone strike in September of 2011. It was followed two weeks later by another strike that killed dozens, including al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old, Colorado-born son, Abdulrahman. Initial news reports, promoted by U.S. military sources, claimed that Abdulrahman was 21-years-old. Discovery of his birth certificate in Denver exposed the deceit, one that was consistent with the U.S. military's stated policy that any military-aged males in a U.S. strike zone are considered enemy combatants, “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” At the time, Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs offered the disgusting justification for the murder that the boy “should have had a more responsible father.”

The bombing has only escalated in Yemen in the past five years as the U.S. and the U.K. carry out the muscle work for the gangsters of the House of Saud. Now comes word that a commando raid in Yemen by the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 yesterday has taken the life of 30 more civilians, 10 of them women and children, including Abdulrahman’s 8-year-old sister, Nawar. Reporter Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept reports that the girl was shot in the neck and bled out for two hours before dying. The New York Times reports that the raid had been planned and organized for several months, and the Obama administration deferred the decision to execute, as it were, to the incoming Trump team. The Trump team has now acted, and as the new president, during his campaign last year, vowed attacks against terrorists’ families as well as the terrorists themselves, that motive in this killing will certainly now be investigated. Right?

As for the refugee debate and those not yet killed by any of the parties engaged in the War on Terror, it’s worth pointing out that there was virtually no al Qaeda presence in Yemen before Obama’s bombing campaigns began there in 2011. We’re so far past the question of illegality here that it seems almost absurd to have to point out that the United States has not declared war against the country of Yemen. Those drone attacks are the direct and immediate cause of the explosion of anti-American sentiment in that country. But under a President Bush-- or a President Trump, there would have certainly been a public outcry among American liberals in response to the sociopathic destruction of a starvation state, one that serves as a virtual slave labor nation for the Saudi monarchy, but under President Obama, there is widespread delusion and perverted rationalization.

The banning of green card holders and refugees from these nations from entering the United States is finally the bridge too far for self-proclaimed liberals and for Republican apparatchiks of the military state like Lindsey Graham and John McCain (and Mike Pence, before Trump selected him as his running mate), and it is certainly a relief that we have finally identified the exact depth of the well’s bottom. It’s also encouraging to see America’s “mainstream” journalistic organizations back at their post, expressing anger at actions that are clearly unconstitutional, but I don't think that it’s entirely accurate to call the new bans “anti-Muslim” because, if they were anti-Muslim, then Pakistanis and Indonesians would be forbidden to enter the U.S. They are not. The countries of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and UAE have produced the most anti-Western terrorists, and their citizens are all excluded from the ban as well. The difference between these two groups of Muslim countries is that the ones that escaped sanction have militaries-- and, even more importantly, they have capitalists.

It has nothing to do with where Donald Trump does business, however. This is long-standing American "guilt-by-nationality” policy, and these countries were each singled out originally during Obama’s presidency. He signed a bill into law in December of 2015 called the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act. It serves as the Trump administration's legal marker in this matter. With this law, citizens from 38 friendly countries were approved for entry into the U.S. without a visa, unless they had visited-- specifically-- Iran, Syria, Sudan, or Iraq, and Obama added Libya, Somalia and Yemen to the list in February of last year. The playbook of discrimination that Trump is drawing from arrived at the Oval Office before he did. The power of extrajudicial authority that he’s wielding from the executive branch were put there by Presidents Bush and Obama, and by a very bipartisan consensus of Congress. Therefore, regarding Trump as an aberration, rather than as the inevitability he's been since 9-11, promotes a monstrous historical lie. America’s war theory has deep roots, its operations, deep tentacles, and if I haven’t already belabored the point: it’s as sure as shit that this didn’t all start on January 20th.

posted by CM @ 9:30 PM